It usually happens quickly.
Sometimes it takes hours, other times the wooing process needs a few weeks. In the end, it doesn't take long to meet a sympathetic stranger, share some good times, make some plans for the future, feel like a tight unit, then find out too late that the hug is really a hold you can't break free of.
This is the typical scenario in the local slave trade. Human trafficking goes on all across the north, and it takes different forms. At a symposium held Wednesday at UNBC, some of the details were explained by people who have witnessed the harshest realities of it.
"People usually respond that 'human trafficking' to them means the sex trade and girls being sold and moved to other towns for sex exploitation, and yes it can look like that, but human trafficking also looks like forced labour," said an RCMP officer specializing in human trafficking who could not disclose her name because of the nature of her work. "I had to respond to a case in Valemount where eight people were being treated poorly, to say the least, in their job situation. So if you think about Valemount, a remote northern town of about 2,000 people, and it had eight victims of concern in that one case, do you really think a place like Prince George doesn't?"
Glendene Grant still has to fight tears when explaining how close to local homes the human trafficking issue hits. The Kamloops woman ended up having to face off against an international drug and human trafficking ring with connections. Members of that ring were also the last certain ones to see her 21-year-old daughter Jessie Foster before her once strong family connections withered away to no contact whatsoever over the past eight years.
"A place like Prince George and Kamloops is a hub, especially up here where there are so many small communities where people get drawn from into the big city," said Grant, who mapped out how her daughter disappeared.
Foster was a strikingly beautiful young woman who was also independent and confident but not as savvy as she should have been, in hindsight, said her mom. She was befriended by a guy who seemed to click with the young woman freshly out on her own. He showed her a good time, picked up the tab, and made good on a couple of exciting promises of trips to exotic locations. But there was also more and more controlling behaviour from the man, compounded by his circle of other people who played a role in drawing Foster in. Contact got less and less, and also more strange. Grant and the family were alarmed, but Foster was seemingly withdrawing by choice.
There were signs at the time, and much confirmation found out in the investigation of her disappearance, that Foster was being extorted, threatened, and beaten into the submission of this circle of friends. When she dropped out of contact completely eight years ago, Grant believes Foster may have been murdered that last day of communication, or she may have been sold to international sex slavery perpetrators, or she may be alive and nearby.
"We don't ever want to blame the victims," said Grant. "We don't want to say 'Jessie, do you want to go to Las Vegas and get beaten and forced into the sex trade and cut off from your family?' because that is not what she thought was happening and not what she wanted. For all those victims, it was what happened to them. It is not who they are or what they wanted for themselves."
No matter what Foster's ultimate fate was, it doesn't change the need for the public to lobby government and society itself for change, said the two speakers.
Grant said the so-called Nordic Model of lawmaking is what she prefers for the sex trade in Canada: a three-pronged approach that decriminalizes prostitution for the man or woman being sold, strongly penalizes the merchant side of the sexual transaction, and significantly funds programs for the health and well-being of those in or exiting the sex trade.
The police officer stressed that there have been 172 criminal files in Canada attached to the human trafficking chapter of Criminal Code or the similar Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. Convictions have been won in 24 of those. Consequences have been weak in most cases, case law has not established a culture of deterrence, and there are legislative loopholes. Those can all be improved by public pressure applied to government.
For anxious mothers and dedicated investigators alike, there are reasons to hope. There have been several tips in the case of Jessie Foster, and some have been connected at least to the closure of other cases if not yet hers. When three women were discovered in residential captivity in Cleveland, each one had been missing about 10 years and held in mortal fear by a lone male. It gave Grant a thin ray of hope that her daughter could be in a similar situation waiting for her eventual break to freedom.
But because selling a human being, for work of for sex, is hard to detect, hard to prosecute without copious evidence, and each victim making continual money for the slave traders, human trafficking is estimated to soon become the largest stream of criminal revenue, surpassing the drugs and weapons industries.
"If you were a criminal, what would you rather do: be outside in the snow, trying to push joints at $5 each, or have a girl turning tricks 15 or 20 tricks a day at $100 each? How many joints would you have to sell to come close to that kind of cash return?," asked the investigator. "And if I find you with drugs on you, I can arrest you for that and confiscate your revenue source. But if I find you with a human being who doesn't talk to me about what's really going on here, I can't do those things."