THUNDER BAY - The sexual exploitation of women and children is a growing global problem, and one this city is not immune to.
That's according to Major Karen Puddicombe of the Salvation Army Anti-Exploitation Task Force. Puddicombe and the Anti-Exploitation Task Force held a sexual exploitation awareness forum Monday that saw police, health-care workers, and various agencies come together to discuss the issue on both a global and local level.
“It is here,” she said. “We want to pretend that it is not in my backyard. We want to believe that no way, not in Thunder Bay, not in our high schools, not in our elementary schools, it’s not happening here. It’s big city stuff.”
Puddicombe said it is time to face reality and accept that people in the community face sexual exploitation and it’s time to start having a conversation about it.
“Sexual exploitation is basically an individual being exploited for the gain of another,” Puddicombe said.
“There is a level of exploitation that takes place within an everyday realm for many high school students, many people in our community, who allow themselves and, to many degrees, are coerced into a position of exploitation.”
The forum included several guest speakers addressing issues involving human trafficking, prostitution, and pornography.
Writer and journalist, Victor Malarek, author of The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex Trade and The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It, provided a global perspective on sexual exploitation during his keynote talk.
According to Malarek, there is one reason alone that sustains prostitution around the world: demand.
“If it wasn’t for men demanding sex from prostituted women and because they have money in their pockets and they can do what they want,” Malarek said in an interview.
“It’s men who fuel the sex trade and men who fuel the pornography trade and it’s time that men, good men, got up and said that enough is enough this is not a manly thing to do.”
Malarek said paying for sex is massively prevalent among men from all walks of life.
He added that justifications used to defend the sex trade are meaningless because 96 per cent of women who are prostituted never wanted to be in that life.
“For me, the hope is people will discuss this and not buy into any of the: prostitution is the oldest profession,” he said. “Prostitution is the oldest oppression. That’s all it’s ever been and that’s all it will ever be.”
The prevalence of sexual exploitation today, particularly for young people still trying to understand sexuality and relationships, is due largely to living in the age of the Internet.
“The Internet has exploded the sex trade and exploded prostitution,” Malarek said. “Many of the women who are involved in pornography, especially this triple X stuff, which has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with violence and degradation of a women. It has taken prostitution into an explosion. Men watch it and then men want it.”
Bridget Perrier, co-founder and First Nation educator for Sex Trade 101, shared her story of being lured into prostitution at the age of 12.
Perrier said there is a lack of services for prostituted women and she believes that services should be survivor-run. She added that more pressure needs to be put on local police services to conduct ‘john busts.’
“It’s not the girl who is selling herself that is the problem, it’s the man who’s buying her,” Perrier said.
“Women don’t choose to be prostitutes, prostitution chooses them based on what they have been through, like childhood trauma, mainly sexual abuse, and divorce.”
Puddicombe said she hopes the forum will start a conversation on the local level and bring this issue to the forefront in order to help young people build strong, healthy relationships.
“Not ones that are going to suck them into a vortex of exploitation,” she said. “It’s the knowledge is power, and if we can give the power to a young person, we can perhaps start to curb some of this in the future.”
“I think what we need to do is rally together and say our girls and our women are not for sale in Thunder Bay,” Perrier said.
