I agree. Canadian parents expect the police—to use Mr. McConaghy's term—to rescue their children when they're being recruited, when they're being exploited by often older impressive people who want to take advantage of them. That's the expectation.
I also want to echo some of the comments around the need for more education, including for the police in terms of emphasizing the fact that sex trade workers are victims and the intervention needs to be focused on assisting as opposed to criminalizing. I think that policing has changed. Our culture has changed and we're wrapping our minds more around that, but we still.... I'm just seeing too many examples of where just having casual contact with a police officer on the street results in a sex trade worker being beaten up.
So the tools are important and I think the idea here is to prevent people from being victimized even more than they already are. As a front-line officer, I agree with Mr. McConaghy. It's just horrendous what women will consent to for very little money. It's often because they're in the throes of addiction or because they're being horrifically exploited by a pimp or by someone who purports to be a boyfriend or a husband or whatever. Somehow we have to be able to intervene in that.