The terrible legacy is that Cambodia is one of poorest, most corrupt countries in the world with the second highest number of landmines.

There is no social safety net here. No welfare. No health care. No free schooling. No mandatory minimum wages.

Half of all Cambodians survive on less than $1 a day. The average factory worker earns $61 a month. Police are not only poorly paid, their meagre wages also have to cover the cost of uniforms, guns and ammunition.

Judges are frequently bribed.

But it’s also a country brimming with children. More than half of Cambodia’s 14.7 million citizens are under the age of 18.

If you’re looking to exploit children, this is a good place to come because there are so many desperately poor parents willing to do desperate things.

With all of its problems, Cambodia is a destination of choice for so-called sex tourists and it’s here that Canada’s most notorious travelling sex offenders have come.

British Columbians Donald Bakker and Kenneth Klassen — two of only five Canadians convicted under the Criminal Code’s “sex tourism” provisions — came here. So did Chris Neil of Maple Ridge, who was on Interpol’s most wanted list before being convicted in Bangkok for sexually abusing two under-aged boys.

It’s impossible to know how many Canadian men have visited Cambodia and sexually abused children, just as it is impossible to know how many other travelling sex offenders from other countries have visited and escaped prosecution. The only statistic that even hints at the amount of Canadian sexual predators abroad comes from the federal government, which says that since 1997,136 Canadian men have sought consular help overseas after having been arrested or imprisoned for child sex offences.

What is known is that the number of tourists to Cambodia — both good and bad — grows every year. Inbound tourists increased 12 per cent in 2010 to 2.5 million. That number increased a further 26 per cent in the first half of 2011.

What sets Cambodia apart among so-called sex-tourist destinations is the age of the children exploited here, according to non-governmental organizations who work to rescue victims and counsel the survivors. Children as young as three have been, and continue to be, rescued from brothels; the youngest are almost always procured for foreigners.

Because raping children is so sadly normalized here, some experts say it creates situational or opportunistic pedophiles — men who might not dream of having sex with a child at home, but are willing to give it a try here.

The Cambodian government’s 2006 estimate of 30,000 children being commercially sexually exploited has never been updated. The government has never provided an estimate of how many additional children have been trafficked outside the country and are working in forced or indentured labour.

But last June, the United Nations committee on the rights of the child special report on Cambodia expressed “deep concern” that thousands of children are exploited in prostitution — that’s child rape. It also noted, “an alarming proportion of children are exposed to sexual violence and pornography.”

Among the committee’s other concerns are that: perpetrators of child sexual abuse and exploitation are rarely prosecuted because of the widespread practice of out-of-court settlements and compensation paid to victims’ families; limited action is taken against sex offenders and operators of brothels and other sex establishments where under-aged girls are sexually exploited; and, that rehabilitation services and shelters for victims of sexual exploitation are almost all in the capital and almost all are run by non-governmental organizations.

In the first nine months of 2011, 118 cases involving trafficking and children were heard in Phnom Penh municipal court. More were heard in other tourist-friendly places such as Siem Reap, near the famous Angkor Wat, and the beach resort villages in and around Sihanoukville.

Part of what’s pushing travelling sex offenders into Cambodia is neighbouring Thailand’s increased enforcement of child sexual abuse laws, according to western diplomatic sources and non-governmental groups such as World Vision and ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes).

And with six million Cambodians under the age of 18 — and 1.6 million under the age of five — there’s a boundless supply of victims.

Online and underground

Things have changed since Donald Bakker arrived here in 2003 from Vancouver and went to find his victims in the notorious pedophile paradise called Svay Pak about 11 kilometres from downtown Phnom Penh.

Little girls and boys are no longer openly marketed on Svay Pak’s main street.

The trade has largely gone underground and online.

It’s likely because of the Internet that Burnaby art dealer Kenneth Klassen could step off a plane even a decade ago and within 48 hours have procured, assaulted and videotaped eight girls, the youngest of whom was eight.

The 59-year-old pleaded guilty in 2010 only after his attempt to have Canada’s sex tourism law — Criminal Code Sections 7 (4.1) to 7 (4.3) — declared unconstitutional. Those laws — passed in 1997 — says that anyone who commits sexual offences against children outside Canada is deemed to have committed that offence in Canada.

In sentencing Klassen to 11 years in jail — less than a year each for abusing six Colombian girls and eight Cambodian girls — B.C. Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen described what Klassen had done as “a gross violation of the natural imperative to protect children.”

It was the longest sentence given for that offence.

Canada’s first sex tourist — Bakker — received seven years in prison; two years for a horrifically violent assault on a Vancouver woman and five for abusing seven Cambodian girls, the youngest of whom was only seven.

Bakker gets out of jail in June.

Compare that with the sentence given ex-Marine Michael Pepe, who abused seven Cambodian girls and was sentenced about the same time as Klassen in a California court. Pepe, who was 55 at the time, received 110 years. It’s a ridiculous sentence even for a young man, but it makes the point that Americans view sex tourism as an intolerable crime.

And while Canada’s sex tourism law is well-crafted and has been deemed by the courts to be constitutional, Klassen was the last person charged.

Another British Columbian, Orville Mader, was arrested at Vancouver airport in 2007 after a worldwide manhunt. Mader had fled home from Thailand carrying only his laptop to avoid arrest on charges of sexually abusing a seven-year-old boy.

A judge set Mader free on bail, but placed restrictions on him, while police investigated and Crown prosecutors determined whether to lay sex tourism charges. Mader was restricted from using the Internet, being in contact with children or going anywhere they might congregate. His passport was taken away and he was to report regularly to Surrey police.

While he lived under those restrictions, Mader was convicted in absentia in Thailand. But in November 2010, police and B.C. prosecutors allowed Mader’s conditions to lapse. The Crown had decided that the evidence didn’t meet Canadian standards. Mader was free. Whether he got his passport back, Canadian officials won’t say, citing privacy laws.

Then there’s the case of Ernest Fenwick MacIntosh. Last year, the 67-year-old from Cape Breton had his conviction on 17 charges of gross indecency and indecent assault of six Canadian boys overturned because it had taken so long to get to court. Their allegations dated back to the 1970s and by the time the victims came forward in 1995, MacIntosh was in India.

Twice, the Canadian passport office failed to revoke his passport. Finally, in 2006, Canada requested MacIntosh’s extradition from India. That was the same year the Toronto Star reported that two Indian men had alleged MacIntosh assaulted them while they were boys living in an orphanage.

“I think there’s a need for a more aggressive stand with respect to the acquisition and analysis of intelligence and a better co-ordinated approach to [sex tourism],” Insp. Sergio Pasin of the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children said in a phone interview.

Pasin is in the process of formulating a national strategy that is likely to focus mainly on men who access child pornography online.

“In my view, these are the individuals you really need to look at because they’re grooming and luring and then they transition from the online offender or have the potential for transitioning from the online offender to the hands-on offender. So then the next phase you have to look at is whether they have the potential to travel and have they travelled in the past? Where have they gone? And so on.”

International action

Pushed by faith-based and non-governmental organizations as well as celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and the formidable Somaly Mam, who was a child sex slave in Cambodia, other Western governments such as the United States, Australia and Britain have made greater efforts to prosecute sex tourists and protect children abroad.

The United States passed its sex tourism law in 1994, which was amended and renamed the Protect Act in 2002 when it also began Operation Predator that links not only American police agencies to U.S. border security, it allows them to partner with foreign governments in both overt and covert child pornography and sex tourism investigations.

Among the recent investigations, one involved setting up a website for sex tourists that had Canada as its destination. The two-year project, which ended in March 2011, resulted in the conviction of two Germans and two Americans.

Operation Twisted Traveller, which was conducted in Cambodia over two years in collaboration with a French-based, non-profit organization — Action Pour Les Enfants — resulted in the arrests of three Americans who had previous convictions in the United States for sexually abusing children. The three were arrested in 2009. One pleaded guilty; the other two are in jail awaiting trial in Los Angeles.

Earlier this month, Britain closed what was described by the international child protection group ECPAT as “the three-day loophole,” which allowed registered sex offenders to leave the country for up to three days without notifying police. Now, they must notify authorities of all foreign travel plans.

Earlier this year, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) began Project Childhood, a $7.5-million, three-year program involving the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, Interpol and World Vision. Working with police and courts to increase enforcement and with community leaders to educate children and their families, the project aims to reduce sexual exploitation of children in tourism in the Mekong Delta region including Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos.

Pushed by western countries and NGOs — and because of a growing fear that ‘good’ tourists are now avoiding it — Thailand has increased enforcement of its child exploitation laws. But that increased enforcement has resulted in sexual predators seeking out countries such as Cambodia where the commitment to prosecuting and jailing child sex offenders is far from certain.

Last year, three foreign pedophiles were granted royal pardons at the government’s request. Among those pardoned was Alexander Trofimov.

Also known as Stanislav Molodyakov, Trofimov is wanted by Interpol for having allegedly raped six girls under the age of 10 before he fled Russia for Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s coastal resort town.

There, the 44-year-old executive director of Koh Puos Investment Group negotiated a deal to build a $300-million resort. But while he was doing that, Trofimov also sexually abused 15 under-aged girls, including a mute 13-year-old.

Trofimov’s sentence was initially 15 years, but that was reduced to eight years in 2010. Then, in May 2011, Trofimov was pardoned after having served half of the reduced sentence.

Freed in Cambodia, he remains on Interpol’s most-wanted list. The Cambodian government has not responded to a request from 14 international children’s’ rights organizations to deport him to Russia.

Lifelong sentence for victims

Pedophiles most often escape arrest. Others may do their time, get pardons and disappear to other countries where they’ll likely re-offend.

But the victims are never free.

“They’ll always have scars,” says Sue Taylor, who has counselled dozens of survivors since coming to Cambodia in 2005. Among the survivors are Donald Bakker’s victims.

The girls refused a request to be interviewed.

“They want to put it behind them. They don’t want to be reminded of the past and they don’t want to be labelled as one of Bakker’s girls,” says Taylor, who works for Hagar International, an Australia-based NGO.

Even though the abuse occurred more than a decade ago, all but one of the girls is still a minor. That’s how young they were when Bakker raped them in tiny rooms in a filthy brothel in Svay Pak, a dusty village outside Phnom Penh that’s a notorious pedophile paradise.

As part of their recovery, the girls have all completed school. One or more of them may qualify for university scholarships; others have completed training programs in administration, child care and hairdressing.

By the end of 2011, all had moved back to Svay Pak to live with their families or foster families even though, as Taylor says, their families were complicit in selling them into Svay Pak brothels.

“Our choice would not be to have them there. But we have to believe that with what they’ve learned about empowerment and resilience, they will be able to make the right decisions.”

Taylor hopes these young women have learned enough to have fulfilling lives, jobs and relationships. She hopes that if they choose to have families, they will be good mothers and wives.

But, she says, “I worry that they’re naive and that they’re really not out of danger. If they hit hard times, I don’t know if they’d go back [to a brothel]. I used to be so idealistic. Now, I realize that you have to let them go, just as you have to let your own children go and you hope that they remember some of the things you taught them.”

What makes it all the more troubling, says Taylor, is that images of one of the girls recently showed up on a pornographic website. She’s also seen images of other sexually exploited children on kiddie porn videos sold for a couple of bucks along the roadside in Phnom Penh.

“It’s just sick that this can go on and on,” she says.

“How can the survivors really ever escape?”

Originally posted on The Vancouver Sun, Friday, March 23, 2012.

At least 73 Canadians have been arrested outside the country for abusing or molesting children or possessing child pornography in the last three years.

That number – 73 – only hints at how many Canadians may actually travel abroad to have sex with children.

Provided by Foreign Affairs in response to an Access to Information request, it accounts only for those who asked for consular assistance after they were detained.

It does not include any who were detained on those charges but didn’t ask for help. It doesn’t include Canadians detained in countries such as Cambodia where Canada does not have an embassy.

Still, it marks a steep increase.

University of B.C. law professor Benjamin Perrin made a similar Access to Information request for 1993 to 2008. In his book, Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking, he wrote that during that 15-year period Foreign Affairs had provided assistance to “more than 150 Canadian men” or roughly 10 each year.

But in 2009, 23 Canadians asked for consular help. In 2010, 28 asked for assistance. And last year, 23 individuals called an embassy or consular office.

Simply put, all of these Canadians either are or have been accused of being sex tourists. Had they not been charged in the country where the offence allegedly occurred, they could have been criminally charged here under Canada’s sex tourism law, which was passed in 1997. Canada is one of about 40 countries that has an extraterritorial law for child sex offenders.

Estimates of how many travelling sexual predators there are worldwide are hard to come by. Most estimates are for the number of children who are exploited. But even those vary wildly.

In its 2005 Trafficking in Persons report, the U.S. State Department said sex tourists and traffickers exploit more than one million children each year. The following year, UNICEF’s estimate was that two million children were exploited, while ECPAT — an international coalition of organizations that advocate for sexually exploited children — suggested there are 270,000 child prostitutes in India alone.

The new data from Foreign Affairs provides a snapshot of preferred locations. Canadians requested help at 28 different offices in 14 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Dominican Republic, Germany, Haiti, Mali, Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand.

And while there’s a perception that travelling sexual predators prefer exotic locations in developing countries where law enforcement is lax, what’s surprising is that many — if not most — Canadians calling for help were in the United States. And they weren’t all in one city or even one state. The calls were made to Canadian offices in Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

(Because the number arrested or detained is very small, Foreign Affairs refused to say how many individuals went to each office, citing concern that those individuals could potentially be identified.)

Originally Posted by, The Vancouver Sun, Thursday, March 22, 2012.

But the reality of his new life was harsh, a court heard. Made to live with two other men in a cramped basement room of Mr. Kolompar’s house in a quiet residential area in Hamilton, he worked 14-hour days plastering stucco in a Burlington subdivision. In the evenings, he and his co-workers scrubbed floors, cleaned toilets and washed dishes for his boss. They subsisted off scraps from the table. When he became weak and had trouble working, he said Mr. Kolompar hit him several times.

On Thursday, Mr. Kolompar, a 37-year-old father of two teenagers, pleaded guilty to taking part in what is alleged to be one of the largest human-trafficking rings in Canadian history.

In a statement of facts read out in court, RCMP Constable Lepa Janjovic said Mr. Kolompar is part of a large Hungarian crime family. For more than two years, the organization brought men to Hamilton from Hungary and had them work for several construction companies for little or no pay. They threatened to harm the men’s families in Hungary if they complained.

Mr. Kolompar, who came to Canada in early 2008, also falsely obtained tens of thousands of dollars worth of welfare money by lying to authorities and not telling them about his business.

“This was an invasion of evil, a criminal organization coming here unmolested and getting paid to exploit, Crown attorney Toni Skarica said. “It was a reign of terror.”

Mr. Kolompar sat in the prisoner’s box, wearing a black leather jacket over his orange prison jumpsuit, a Hungarian translator at his side. He gazed intently straight ahead and spoke only to plead guilty.

He was sentenced to six years in prison, which was whittled down to a little over two years after credit for time served. Mr. Kolompar has been in custody since he was arrested in late 2010. Once he is out, he will face deportation proceedings.

Both Mr. Farkas and another of Mr. Kolompar’s workers filed victim impact statements with the court.

“It was like hell. He made me work until I passed out. Just like a slave. He didn’t care that it’s summer and plus 50C and I’m sweating blood. He was sitting in the car, of course, with the air conditioner and he watched us working,” wrote 26-year-old Tibor Danyi. “He was always screaming and threatening me. I was devoured by fear.”

Mr. Kolompar took their documents and locked them in their room. They even had to ask permission to use the washroom, Mr. Danyi wrote. He said he was allowed to wash his clothes only once a month.

Meanwhile, he said, Mr. Kolompar’s family and friends would throw big parties, get drunk and skip work.

On one such occasion in the summer of 2009, when the family was distracted, Mr. Danyi and Mr. Farkas found their documents and hid them in a drill case. The next day, they walked off their job site on Leslie Street in Toronto and escaped to the home of another contractor.

The RCMP began investigating the organization later that year. Ultimately, 13 people were charged. Four of them have been convicted of various offences; others are awaiting trial. Two of them are still at large: one, the alleged ringleader, is believed to be in Hungary; another was last spotted in Peel Region near Toronto.

The names of most of the accused are under a court-ordered publication ban.

Originally published by The Globe and Mail, Thursday, March 1, 2012.

The TruckSTOP campaign is an initiative from the Ottawa volunteer group Persons Against the Crime of Trafficking in humans, or PACT-Ottawa.

The program, funded in part by Public Safety Canada, is reaching out to transport truck drivers and people working at roadside stops to help them learn what to look for in cases of human trafficking and to report these instances.

“We think they can be a tremendous help in raising the observability and detection of the crime,” said Duncan Baird, the director of the campaign. “There’s first of all so many of them. And they’re so well positioned to observe it. We really want to recruit them to the fight against human trafficking.”

The pilot program, slated to launch in April, will include providing point-of-sale displays at stops from Windsor to Ottawa with tips for truckers on spotting human trafficking.

Truck-stop owner haunted by incident

Gail Cameron, the owner of Antrim Truck Stop in Arnprior, Ont., said she believes human trafficking is happening in the area and said she is haunted by an incident where she failed to act.

“I had an experience about 15 years ago where I had two young girls come into the truck stop,” said Cameron.

“They were with a man and there was something wrong. And I never did anything about it. They looked really afraid. There was something wrong. It just wasn’t right.”

Truck driver Ron Thompson has been driving the highways for 30 years. He said he already calls in drunk drivers and traffic accidents.

Truckers welcome more information

“We’re the eyes and the ears. We’re out there too, along with the police officers. There’s a lot more of us,” he said.

“Law enforcement is trying to do the best they can. So if we can help…our industry can help. I’m all for it.”

Joe Degier, a truck driver for 34 years, said the information would be welcome.

“I wouldn’t know what to look for if I was driving down the road,” said Degier.

The TruckSTOP information says truckers should watch for people who look like they are being controlled or watched, who are fearing for their safety, tired, hungry or showing signs of physical or emotional abuse and not in possession of identification or travel documents.

Christina Harrison-Baird, the chair of PACT-Ottawa and an International Human Rights Lawyer, said the idea is modelled after an American campaign, where one tip from a trucker helped break up a multi-state trafficking ring based in Ohio.

“There is both sexual exploitation and labour trafficking going on,” said Harrison-Baird.

Originally published by CBCNews Ottawa, Friday, February 24, 2012.

These are just a couple of tawdry listings under the section titled ‘therapeutic massage’ on Craigslist.

Two years after the popular buy-and-sell website bowed under pressure and removed its escort section, some wonder whether those selling sex have simply migrated to another spot on the site.

“You’re always going to have the potential for individuals to continue to violate the rules that Craigslist has set for this,” said UBC law professor Benjamin Perrin, an expert on human trafficking. “It doesn’t mean people aren’t being sold for sex exploitation; they still are.”

Craigslist, he said, isn’t the one-stop shop it used to be for sex but it’s still a place where women are exploited.

According to Perrin, author of Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking, Craigslist used to be “the Walmart of sex trafficking.” Because the website is so commonly used for purchasing services like cleaning and such items as sporting goods and cars, many users visited the site to seek out sexual services.

Early this month, Edmonton resident Norman Washington Walters, 25, was sentenced to jail time for sexual assault with a weapon, unlawful confinement, robbery and theft after attacking three escorts he met through Craigslist in 2009.

Walters’ sentence came just after federal politicians met in late January to discuss legislation that would crack down on pornography and online exploitation of vulnerable persons.

Originally posted on 24 Hours Vancouver, Thursday, February 16, 2012.

Her next three victims were brought to Hamilton by others, but they too lived under her Mohawk Road East roof — with her actual common-law husband. They ate scraps, had their identification seized and were instructed to make false refugee and welfare claims. They never saw their benefit money or wages from work in her family’s construction businesses.

Gizella Kolompar, 43, pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring to commit human trafficking and participating in a criminal organization. Her co-accused in the biggest human trafficking case in Canadian history cannot be named because of a publication ban.

She was sentenced to two years in prison, on top of eight months spent in pretrial custody. Other charges, including fraud, were withdrawn because of the plea; but Superior Court Justice Stephen Glithero ordered she pay back the $13,724.26 owed to Ontario Works for her and her victims’ welfare claims.

Her husband of 24 years, Lajos Domotor, 43, pleaded guilty to similar charges last month. He is dying of stomach cancer and received a 10½ month sentence. A youth pleaded guilty to related charges in September and was deported.

Like her husband, Kolompar is recommended for early parole, but only to be deported.

Kolompar’s lawyer, Alex Burns, asked for an order to allow his client to see her dying husband in jail. But Glithero denied this request because Kolompar refused to show compassion for her victims, particularly when one man was not allowed to call home after his mother died.

Typically, a guilty plea comes with some sense of remorse, Glithero said, as Kolompar sat quietly with a Hungarian interpreter. “I’m not giving her any credit for remorse because I don’t think people like this woman care for anyone other than themselves.”

Both Kolompar and Domotor have criminal records and are wanted in Hungary on arrest warrants, RCMP Constable Lepa Jankovic told the court.

Yet nothing came up when their names were searched by border officials, and it took until last month for the RCMP to get a straight answer from Hungary.

Kolompar, the court learned, was previously convicted of theft and is wanted on two counts of extortion and two counts of fraud. Most of the other accused parties are also wanted in Hungary.

Assistant Crown attorney Toni Skarica, who routinely calls the criminal group “an invasion of evil,” said something has to change. If “the tiniest fraction of the world’s population” came to Canada and fraudulently claimed refugee status, “we’d be bankrupt,” he said.

“How can this be? What protection is there for the Canadian society?” Skarica said, imploring Glithero to comment on the broader problems this case exposes.

Glithero said he was cautious to respond, but added, “the case does raise concerns.”

Kolompar claimed refugee status and accessed government benefits “in about the amount of time it takes to utter the words (I am a refugee).”

In a statement read by Jankovic, both Kolompar and Domotor are described as latecomers to the organization, but Kolompar “played a substantial role in the crime group,” she said.

She came to Hamilton in November 2008 and her husband followed in May, Jankovic said. The couple’s role in the organization, which is made up of an extended Roma Hungarian family, “was as a recruiter, harbourer and transporter of some of the victims to various locations in order to further the aims of the overall conspiracy.”

Burns made few comments about the details of the case except to say that any wider problems with the immigration or refugee system are out of the control of Kolompar and are “better dealt with in Ottawa.”

Originally Published by the Hamilton Spectator,  Wednesday, February 8, 2012.

Officers will hear from Timea Nagy, a victim of human trafficking.

Nagy said she was lured to Canada with the promise of a job but not long after arriving was forced into the sex trade.

Shelly Gilbert of the Anti-Human Trafficking Action Group of Windsor knows of approximately 40 survivors – men and women – of human traffickers with ties to or residents of Windsor.

Windsor Police staff Sgt. John St. Louis spearheads the police anti-trafficking effort. He said officers and members of the general public should look for signs of human trafficking.

Signs include whether the victim is in control of their own identification and documents or money during hotel check-ins or purchases; and whether they are in control of items like cellphones — or does someone place the call for them?

“One of the skills the traffickers seem to have is the ability to force people into … incredible secrecy,” Shelly Gilbert said.

Victims vary in sex and age

Gilbert said victims are both male and female. Men are often enslaved in the construction field. Women work mainly in the sex trade.

“As there is more of a call for cheap labour, it allows recruiters to lure people … to Canada,” Gilbert said.

“The scope is a lot bigger than we initially recognized,” St. Louis said.

He is aware of one Windsor woman who was exploited. So it’s not just a crime that involves immigrants.

St. Louis said Windsor Police leaned on officers from Toronto for advice when developing the training initiative.

More resources needed

St. Louis and said previous awareness training has already paid dividends.

“One officer was able to come forward just as a result of going to a call. [Using] the awareness training that he received, he basically saw signs of a person being a victim of human trafficking and he was able to call our office. We were able to come in and follow this up,” he said.

St. Louis said the police will expand their anti-human trafficking initiative so the public is better informed.

“Officers sort of have to be aware of the various places that they may interact with potential survivors. I think it’s really important that we’re aware of what is happening in our communities and who these individuals are that are looking for help,” Gilbert said. “Certainly the officers on the street will be able to take these offenders off the street.”

Gilbert said there needs to be more resources dedicated to stop human trafficking.

“We have a group of really dedicated and passionate volunteers. But there are very little supports for this,” she said.

Gilbert praised the Criminal Code and its penalties for those found guilty of the crime.

“But we are not yet seeing anything being provided for the ongoing support and representation to survivors of human trafficking,” she said.

Originally posted on CBC News Wednesday, February 1, 2012.

“Modern day slavery is really manipulation of the mind,” said Joy Smith before speaking to a group of University of Alberta students Thursday afternoon.

“To convince people that they’ll give them everything they want, but their real intention is to sell them.”

It was part of the school’s iCraveFreedom campaign, aimed to shine light on modern day slavery.

“The youth are our future. They’re important people. Education is our greatest weapon. The more they know, the safer they are.” Smith said.

“It’s making a difference today when people are here listening to this, because they learn what to look for.”

Students should keep their eyes open for signs of abuse, she added.

Her passion to combat human trafficking was sparked by her son, who spent two years on the RCMP’s Integrated Child Exploitation Unit.

“The things he has seen has turned his hair grey,” she said. “I found out more than I wanted to know, and that’s when I started to try and do something about it.”

She says organizers of human trafficking rings target the unsuspecting, the vulnerable.

They’re manipulated into giving up their lives, and then once isolated, they are sold.

The trade is the second most profitable in the country next to the drug trade, said Smith.

So far, the RCMP have documented 49 ongoing cases of human trafficking before the courts, involving 76 human trafficking and 143 victims. Out of these 49 cases, 44 are cases of domestic trafficking.

Originally posted on Edmonton Sun, Thursday, January 19, 2012

Mark Anthony Burton, also known as Ricky Downey, appeared in court on Monday via video from Toronto East Detention Centre.

Burton, 43, was charged with two counts of procuring a person to become a prostitute, living on the avails of prostitution and procuring illicit sex. He was also charged with human trafficking.

While human trafficking has been in the Criminal Code for more than six years, Toronto police have laid few charges and have yet to land a conviction.

“This is the first time that we’ve actually laid human trafficking charges in relation to a domestic case, which means that it occurred here in Canada,” Det. Const. Leanne Marchen told CTV Toronto on Monday.

Burton, wearing an orange jumpsuit, showed no reaction to the new charges, CTV Toronto’s Tamara Cherry reported.

During a routine traffic stop at a downtown intersection last summer, Burton was pulled over, police said.

Police allege that they found Burton with an underage sex worker.

“These girls would do sex work and hand over all their earnings in exchange for drugs or a meal,” Marchen said. “Is it voluntary? I don’t believe it is…The one young lady was subjected to physical violence.”

In 1992, Burton was convicted of procuring a person to become a prostitute and assault causing bodily harm. Six years later he was convicted of procuring, exercising control and living on the avails of prostitution.

He also has convictions for gun and drug crimes, robbery, sex assault, extortion, uttering threats and criminal harassment.

Police allege Burton began grooming one girl for prostitution over the phone while he was doing time at Kingston Penitentiary. He was released in 2009.

Burton faces 25 charges, including two counts of human trafficking and two counts of material benefit from human trafficking.

He is scheduled to stand trial on the pimping and human trafficking charges in mid-March.

Police said that they believe there are still victims who have not come forward. They’re asking anyone with information to call the Toronto Police Special Victims Unit at 416-456-7259.

Originally posted on CTV News Toronto, Tuesday, January 17, 2012