If you or someone you know may be a victim of human trafficking, you can call the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: The signs of sex trafficking and sex work are often the same: online ads, curb-side pickups, or heavy foot traffic to a particular home or hotel room. There is a constant in all these scenarios: the sex purchaser, also known as the John, or the trick. Advocates say police need to spend more energy on these people, who are breaking the law.
Walker has worked with victims of human trafficking for more than a decade. As part of an exclusive investigation, CityNews joined her in staking out hotels in London, Ontario, looking for sex work customers. Then I want to take their license number, so if I do see the same car twice, I can confirm who it is. Then I take a bit of a description of the individual and look for the time in and out.
She says the typical sex work customer is inside a hotel room for 30 to 45 minutes at most. She stresses that while some people are consensually engaging in sex work, those who are trafficked are not.
Walker says that by cracking down on customers, the incentive to traffic people into sex work would disappear. We have agreed to conceal his identity because he does undercover police work. When interviewed in May , he told CityNews the he could recall two charges for sex purchasing being laid by London police since January He says his team knows more purchasing and more trafficking is happening, but the pandemic is impacting their ability to work.
It is preventing us from meeting with the sex trade workers as often as we used to. It is stopping us from doing John stings. In an month period, police in Hamilton, Windsor, Halifax, Moncton and many other locations laid zero sex purchasing charges. In Vancouver, a trafficking hotspot, police laid 15 charges. In Alberta, the ALERT law enforcement unit which is largely entrusted with combatting human trafficking, laid 36 charges — 35 in Edmonton, one in Calgary. Map of sex purchasing charges laid under Criminal Code After CityNews spoke to the London police sergeant, the service seems to have to have laid a flurry of charges.
