Invisible Chains by Benjamin Perrin

Author:Benjamin Perrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

13

FROM AVERAGE JOES TO AVERAGE JOHNS

Sean’s request to the escort agency was simple: He asked for a woman to be sent to his Toronto hotel room. He didn’t plan on cruising the streets, and wanted to avoid the tackiness of having sex in a car. This way he’d discreetly have an hour with a woman he’d never met—and who’d ever find out?

The person who arrived at his hotel room door was young. In fact, she was fifteen at most, and delivered by a couple of burly men who kept her under their control. When Sean was alone with the girl, she extended her small hand and nervously gave him a folded bit of paper. It contained just two words: Help me.

Sean reacted swiftly. By his own account, he “got the hell out of there,” leaving the young girl to be found by her handlers. For whatever reason—the shock brought on by the girl’s plea, or the shattering of the myth that paying for sex was a victimless crime—he’d lost interest.

Once out of the hotel, Sean had to tell someone what had happened, but he didn’t want to make himself known to the police. Instead, he told the story of the frightened little girl to his friend Chris. The girl had begged Sean to save her. And he hadn’t.

Chris could hardly believe the story and his friend’s refusal to act. Well, if Sean wouldn’t get involved, Chris would. He called Crime Stoppers and gave the operator the details of Sean’s experience, including the name of the escort agency. Crime Stoppers relayed the information to the Toronto Police Service, which recognized the name of the individual associated with the agency’s telephone number, a man already known to be running a prostitution ring.

A police officer called the escort agency, posing as a potential client looking for a young Asian girl and hoping that the girl who had been brought to Sean’s hotel room would arrive in the company of her traffickers.

Detective Sergeant Mike Hamel of the Toronto Police Service, Sex Crimes Unit, picks up the story. “We had the phone number of the escort service he called, so we set it all up,” Hamel recalls. “We were hoping the same thing would happen, but we got an older female. We ran into problems.”

Lacking first-hand evidence of an underage girl being sold for sex, the officers had no choice but to rely on a statement from Sean. With that in hand, the police likely could obtain search warrants to investigate the escort agency and try to find the terrified girl.

However, the refusal of Sean to contact police meant that the investigation could proceed no further, and the young girl who’d appealed for help almost certainly would continue to be sexually abused.

“We never found her,” says Detective Sergeant Hamel with sadness in his voice. “We go from one fire to the next. To me, that’s not good enough.”

Escort agencies: Selling sex through thinly veiled language

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