The Trauma Beat by Tamara Cherry

Author:Tamara Cherry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Looking back on it now, it all makes me a bit uncomfortable. I was invited to the Investigative Services building in Mississauga to meet with the vice team. After an illuminating hour-or-two conversation about the Toronto-area sex trade, and the many hundreds of people likely enslaved in it, I was shown to the detective’s office where a victim liaison officer was sitting with the young woman from Case #5. First, I interviewed the cops, next I got the victim.

Survivor. She prefers the term survivor.

My ensuing conversation with Hope196 would fill more than 14 single-spaced pages of transcript, virtually all of it descriptions of the barely 18-year-old woman’s misery over the previous several years. The threats. The violence. The johns. The childhood abuse that preceded it all. The feelings of being unlovable that followed.

The discomfort I have reflecting on this interview stems from, I believe, a few things. First, I can’t shake the feeling that Hope’s story was being used. My intentions, and the intentions of the officers, may have been good—to use Hope’s experience to illustrate the pervasive and misunderstood problem of human trafficking—but it was being used no less. Hope was being used. Further, she had escaped her most recent trafficker only three months earlier. She was still swimming in trauma. And there I was, with my voice recorder on the desk between her and me, at times struggling to hear what she was saying because she was speaking so softly and crinkling the empty plastic water bottle in front of her so loudly, as if she did not want to be heard.

But my feelings are conflicted. Because nobody was talking about domestic sex trafficking at the time. Human trafficking was a phrase policymakers avoided. The survivor supports, public awareness campaigns, and funding announcements that exist today simply did not exist in 2008. Few people understood how traffickers operated. And the small teams of officers who were trying to tackle this problem across the country were grossly understaffed, ensuring that countless victims (not yet survivors) would never be found, never be given the opportunity to live free, meaningful lives. I had been incredibly naive to the realities of the sex trade and the many enslaved within it. And now I had an opportunity to educate the public about this horrific crime. And these officers had an opportunity to show other potential victims that there was a way out. And we all felt there was an opportunity for Hope to gain back some of the control that had been stripped away from her for so many years by telling her story, which would fill two double-page spreads in the weeks that followed.

There would be many more stories about Hope over the years, as I followed her recovery and the progression of her various court cases. And many stories about many other survivors. “‘Throwaway kids’ at risk,” read one front-page headline, accompanied by a picture of hands (my hands) holding a teddy bear, wrists (my wrists) chained together.197 “No way out,” read another.

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