Travelling exhibit on human trafficking to travel across Canada

On a six-city tour across Canada, a travelling exhibit highlighting human trafficking in the country is aiming to grab the attention of the demographic most affected by the crime at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in Toronto.

The awareness campaign was launched by Public Safety Canada (PSC) under the country’s national strategy to combat human trafficking. It kicked off in Halifax in July, visiting Montreal, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg and Edmonton, before making its last three-day stop in Toronto on Aug. 29.

Leticia Hernandez Frias, the manager of anti-human trafficking policy with PSC, says the CNE was strategically chosen as a tour stop.

“We chose locations where we would have a big influx of people — young people particularly as they are most vulnerable to human trafficking,” she explained. “The vast majority of detected victims are women and girls, so this is a highly gendered crime as far as we know. And even more alarmingly one in four of them are under the age of 18.”

The exhibit aims to dispel misconceptions and myths about what trafficking looks like in a country like Canada, so people can spot it more effectively.

“Ninety-five per cent of Canadians confuse human smuggling with human trafficking and that means they’re looking for all of the wrong things,” said Julia Drydyk, the executive director of The Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, which operates the Canadian human trafficking hotline.

“They’re looking for people that are being kidnapped, chained up and forced into the commercial sex industry … when really human trafficking in Canada looks far more like intimate partner violence.”

There are four main differences between human smuggling and human trafficking:

• Human smuggling involves moving people across borders and is by nature, transnational. Human trafficking often happens within a country.
• People who are smuggled are usually free to do whatever they want once they have arrived at their destination country. Those who are trafficked have their freedoms severely curtailed and are forced into labour or sexual activities.
• With human smuggling, profits come from the fee associated with smuggling a person. In trafficking, profits are made by exploiting the victim.
• Human smuggling usually means the person involved has consented to being smuggled. People who are trafficked have either never given their consent, or their consent is meaningless given the trafficker’s exploitation.

“Traffickers look for individuals with vulnerabilities in their lives,” said Drydyk. “That could be problems at home, issues with their friends, maybe problems at school. They’ll love-bomb them, they’ll find out their greatest hopes, dreams and aspirations but then they’ll quickly take that away as a way to coerce and force them into the commercial sex industry, all for their own profit.

“[This exhibit] is challenging people [to understand] human trafficking outside of smuggling, across borders, forcible confinement and kidnapping.”

The exhibit at the CNE has five stations that inform people of the realities of human trafficking, including an interactive quiz component. As people answer the questions, facts and statistics are presented to help them understand the extent of the problem in Canada and how to recognize the signs of both sexual and labour trafficking.

“We are looking for changes in behaviour, physical appearance and relationships with family and friends,” said Hernandez Frias. “For example, do they have any relationship that they won’t introduce to friends and family? Are they isolating from family and friends? Are they allowed to speak for themselves? Do they seem fearful, nervous, or tense?

“For forced labour cases [we are looking] for signs of the individual being unpaid or paid very little and seeming to be treated poorly, working long or unusual hours, not allowed breaks or forced to live in poor conditions. Do their activities seem to be controlled by someone else? Are their travel documents controlled by someone else?”

Drydyk adds they have seen an uptick in what she refers to as trafficking remotely in recent years.

“As our youth are spending more time on their phones and social media, anecdotally, we also know that there’s an increase in luring, grooming and recruitment online,” she said. “We’ve also heard about an increase in online sexual activity, [like] web camming, and again, coercing individuals into that type of sexual activity for profit, often against their will, using physical threats, but also emotional control and psychological violence.”

Hernandez Frias says due to the hidden nature of the crime and the reluctance of victims to come forward, it is difficult to determine the true scope of human trafficking in Canada.

“In spite of that police services in Canada reported almost 3,000 incidents of human trafficking between 2010 and 2020. According to the latest numbers released by Statistics Canada, the large majority of human trafficking incidents were reported in urban centers, and one in five were reported in the census metropolitan area of Toronto,” she said.

She says they hope the exhibit, which runs until Aug. 31, will encourage people to not only educate themselves about the rampant crime, but also encourage them to stay vigilant in their communities.

“Human trafficking is a horrible crime, but we can all do our part by being informed and staying alert. This may be happening to you. It could be happening to someone you know, or who you have never met, but knowing the signs and what human trafficking looks like can help you make a difference,” she said.

If you’re looking for help or suspect someone is being trafficked, you can contact the confidential Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-833-900-1010. If there is immediate danger, call 9-1-1.