of the illegal arms trade and global drug trafficking. An estimated $120 million to $400 million comes into Canada
each year.
A large part of human trafficking has to do with the sex
market.
GREED AND DESPERATION
Savelia Curniski was at a truck stop in Ukraine about five
years ago when she noticed something disturbing. “Girls
were being taken into trucks – young girls, 12 or 13.” Until
then, Curniski had never heard of human trafficking. But
back in Canada, after travelling from Saskatoon to Edmonton to hear renowned Canadian journalist Victor Malarek
speak on the subject, “a whole world was revealed.”
By the time she and her friends got back to Saskatoon,
they had summoned enough passion and commitment
among themselves to begin an organization to help prevent
Ukrainian girls from being bought and sold. NASHI, which
means “ours” in Ukrainian, provides education and skills
development and is currently remodelling an old Soviet-style
building into a safe house ( www.nashi.ca).
Ukrainian orphanages are populated with children whose
parents have died or don’t have the resources to care for
them. But Curniski found “Nobody cared about the orphans
who were leaving the orphanages.” Extreme poverty has
made Ukraine an easy place for predators to come in and lure
young girls with the promise of jobs, only to sell them and
resell them across Europe and into North America.
Greed – for both money and power – feeds the industry
on the demand side of trafficking. Desperation – for money
