I just wanted to touch on what Ms. Wesley said and how passionate she is. The safety of the people who are involved in this has to be paramount. What I have observed throughout my career is the vulnerability of recruiters, and the women and girls who are involved in this often become recruiters as a result of the abuse that they've gone through. I agree with Ms. Wesley that many people don't get into this dichotomy of the glorified sex trade work versus the horrors that most of them face. The girls I've met and the girls I work with become recruiters because if they're recruiting, then they're not subjected to the same level of violence. They're now recruiters.
In this law there is a punishment for recruiters, but our laws are such that it is very difficult to prosecute a recruiter who is the middle person and who is also a victim—like the girls who pimped out the young girls in Ottawa—and that evades the actual pimp. The pimp evades the prosecution if we're going after recruiters, so the recruiters are the ones who look like they're the pimps. With these teenage girls, we were never able to find out who was above them. I have no doubt in my mind that they were involved in prostitution.
How did they control these girls? They're young girls. They're the same age. We have to find a way to protect young girls from recruiting other young girls. They were the exact same age. They went to a party; they forcibly confined them; they drugged them, and then they turned them out onto the streets.
In the other cases that I've been involved in the pimp had young girls at the same age—15, 16, 13 years old—bringing them to parties, bringing them to hotel rooms. They were vulnerable victims from areas where we have to question ourselves where they are running from and what they are running to.
Mr. Morrison's question was what some of the solutions would be. We need to ask two questions. One is how we prosecute a person who is procuring when the bigger issue is why they are procuring and where that money is going. The other is how we recognize that the person procuring may also be a victim.
I did have a case where we prosecuted the procurer. She was a 16-year-old girl at the time. We put her through the youth criminal justice system and she testified at the pimp's trial as well. We always viewed that girl as a victim. She was sentenced to two years. What that did for that girl was get her away from everybody she was associated with, and with that in itself she got her high school diploma. She got her college education in those two years, and she's now out in society, married with children, and is actually somebody I contact every now and then.
I don't know if that answers your question perfectly, Mr. Morrison, but some of the solution would be to have social workers in the school deal with high-risk missing youth and recognize the signs. The girls I know and with whom I've become friends through working with them, I've learned from their stories and they've passed this along.