christian activists are calling for help in the fight to stop the exploitation of vulner-
able people by organized crime. concern is rising amid rumours of young women being
brought to vancouver to meet the demand for prostitutes at the 2010 winter olympics.
By Debra Fieguth
He thought he had seen it all. As a firearms expert with the RCMP, Brian McConaghy had inves- tigated the ugliest of murder scenes, including convicted killer Robert William Pickton’s pig farm on the outskirts of Vancouver. But then a
police task force asked him to help in a case involving child
sex tapes originating from Asia.
“This file changed everything for me,” he
says. “I was confronted with seven tiny little
girls, and they’re staring back at me through
the camera as they’re being raped.”
The task force consulted McConaghy because he operated a small Vancouver-based foundation called Ratanak, which he started to ship
medical supplies and provide other help to the
postwar victims of Cambodia’s killing fields.
When he saw the tapes, he instantly confirmed that these girls were ethnic Vietnamese
and that the crimes were taking place in Cambodia. Within 72 hours he was able, with the
help of GPS, to locate the “rape cubicles” where the little girls
were being mutilated by a Canadian predator.
He has since quit the RCMP to work full time with Ratanak, which has expanded its mandate to work with child
exploitation ( www.ratanak.org).
In West Africa, young boys are enslaved on cocoa plantations. In one country, children living in sewers are whisked
away to a hospital, cleaned up and their kidneys harvested
for wealthy families.
On the streets of Vancouver, young Honduran teenage boys are brought in by a gang to sell drugs. “There’s a
debt bondage,” explains Deborah Isaacs, a member of the
Sisters of the Good Shepherd. The boys are
forced to pay back transportation and living
expenses. Almost all their money goes to the
traffickers.
Throughout Canada’s major cities, young
women think they’re coming for nanny or restaurant jobs, only to be enslaved as domestics
or prostitutes.
Sophisticated networks move people from
city to city, from country to country, from
continent to continent. Depending on whose
figures you believe, between 12 million and
27 million people are in slavery today, with
between 600,000 and 800,000 moving across international
borders annually. The RCMP reports that 800 people are
trafficked into Canada and 1,500 to 2,200 are moved from
Canada to the United States each year. Other agencies say the
numbers are several times higher and are growing.
“This is a business that makes money – which is why it’s
growing,” says McConaghy. Unlike the drug industry, where
a product can only be consumed once, “if you spend $50,000
buying 10 human beings, you can work that ‘product’ for
years.”
“It’s a big business,” agrees Jamie McIntosh of London,
Ont., executive director of International Justice Mission
Canada, which works at prevention, prosecution and aftercare ( www.ijm.ca). Selling people, with profits of more
than $30 billion per year, rivals the billion-dollar economies
Between
12 million and
27 million people
are in slavery today,
with between 600,000
and 800,000 moving
across international
borders annually
A GLOBAL SCOURGE
Human trafficking – the buying and selling of human beings
for sexual exploitation or forced labour – takes place in
many forms and it happens throughout the world, including Canada.
In India, International Justice Mission (IJM) works with
victims who have been trafficked for labour as they desperately try to repay debts incurred by their grandparents in
the 1920s.
