Today is worldtraffickingday, and it's, sadly, not as rare as you might think
The club was big. It had two floors and, that night, it was packed. Although the room was dark, lights flashed and were reflected in mirrors along the walls. The air was stale and smelled of drugs. On one of two stages, Markie Dell danced to hip hop songs and stared straight ahead. She let the lights blind her, trying to ignore the breath of unknown men on her bare legs as they leaned toward her on the stage.
Her client drove her to a motel down the road. But Dell soon discovered that her rescuer was no fairy-tale knight in shining armour—and that her ordeal was only just beginning. This past December alone, a 29-year-old man was arrested in Yellowknife for trafficking a woman from Saskatchewan; three men were arrested for allegedly luring and prostituting a 14-year-old girl in hotel rooms across southern Ontario; and in Calgary, police were searching for a 29-year-old woman who, with three teenage boys for accomplices, held a woman captive and forced her to have sex with 10 different men over five days.
Girls and young women from all socio-economic backgrounds are hunted in malls, coffee shops, movie theatres, outside their schools and, increasingly, online. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking this couldn’t be your sister, your daughter, your niece,” Invidiata says. There have been cases where girls were picked up from school, still in their uniforms, pimped out, then dropped off at home. They may be too afraid or ashamed to tell anyone, or may not even realize they’re being exploited.
Dell didn’t realize the trouble she was in when she walked into the strip club—or that she was about to become one of Canada’s trafficked. “I was nervous because Kayla was scary and her friends were scary. I thought, ‘Ok, I’ll make this money for her and it will be over.’ I went in and told people, ‘I’m new, I don’t want to do this,’ but no one cared.” As long as you have two pieces of I.D., you’re allowed to dance. And the manager was only too happy to have a new girl in the club.
The trafficking trap Dell attempted suicide several times, but was always caught. She tried telling her clients—construction workers, businessmen, lawyers, pastors, students, teachers, fathers, grandfathers—what was happening to her. A few suggested she move in with them, offering to “take care of her.” And that’s how she finally found the courage to run.
Dell was forced to strip for another eight months before the owner of the club suspected what was going on and called the police. They took a statement, and she was taken to a safe house. That’s what happened to Dell, who returned to her “boyfriend” when her three days at the safe house were up. “I was still in the mindset that I cared about him,” she says. “And because there’s a limit to how long you can stay at a safe house, I went right back to him after they kicked me out.”
Part of the problem is lack of awareness, and part of the problem is that it’s a hard, ugly topic that people don’t want to talk about, which makes it difficult to get funding. “Companies and corporations don’t want to put their logos on it,” Invidiata says. “It’s not like building schools in Kenya. And it gets messy because a lot of top execs go to strip clubs.”
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