Free Invisible Chains by Benjamin Perrin Page A

caller speaks English. These barriers make it more difficult to access potential victims.
    Dancing slaves in a strip club near you
    Enslavement as a means of forcing women to perform sex acts with strangers isn’t restricted to massage parlours and brothels. Whatever one may think of strip clubs and their activities, the reality often includes young women living and performing under coercion.
    Federal officials in Canada express grave concerns about the exploitation of foreign women as exotic dancers, particularly women from Central and Eastern Europe. For some time these women were being brought into Canada legally and expeditiously under thefederal government’s “exotic dancer visa program.” Concerns about trafficking caused the program to be largely shut down, but trepidation persists.
    A March 2007 email to the Canadian Embassy in Romania from a regional intelligence officer for the Canada Revenue Agency in Niagara Falls, Ontario, identified aspects of the problem. “I have read some dancer contracts and a couple of clauses really troubled me,” the officer wrote. According to her report, one clause stated, “[T]he club owners have the right to hold all ID until the terms of the contract are fulfilled,” while another required “that monies will be held until terms of the contract are fulfilled, less disbursements. These two clauses themselves smack of slavery.”
    Frederick Matern, one of Canada’s top immigration officials in Bucharest, replied in a detailed, but heavily censored, email obtained under the Access to Information Act. Among other things, Matern raised concerns about women from the region being brought to Canada to work as exotic dancers, including evidence of blatant deception by the contractors. “In order to conform to HRSDC [Human Resources and Social Development Canada] requir[e]ments,” Matern noted, “we are getting shown very different contracts by people seeking work permits. I suspect that the contracts that conform to HRSDC are nowhere close to the truth.”
    Indeed, in a case documented by the Canada Border Services Agency, a woman from Romania came to Canada under a work permit as an exotic dancer. Soon after arriving, she was reportedly “forced to do things that she did not wish to do ... was unable to take sick time when required ... [and] there were elements of coercion and threats against her from the bar owners and supervisors.” CIC officials subsequently found the woman to be a victim of human trafficking and offered her assistance.
    Micro-brothels—the (trafficked) girl next door
    In November 2006, two investigative reporters from the Toronto Star uncovered a new and disturbing development in Canada’s sextrade: The practice of providing sexual services through massage parlours, which were too easily identified and raided by police officers, largely had been abandoned in favour of rooms in high- rise apartment buildings. These “micro-brothels” are often right next door to apartments occupied by families, many of them with small children. While low-income neighbourhoods have been home to “trick pads” for decades, “micro-brothels” represent a recent migration of the sex industry into middle- and upper-class communities.
    Micro-brothels are set up in hotel and motel rooms, as well as apartment units and luxury condominiums. Their secret locations are disclosed to men who respond to advertisements for “escorts” or more explicit advertisements on internet bulletin board websites and weekly newspapers. Embedded in our communities, they become venues for the sexual exploitation of victims of human trafficking. Because they “hide in plain sight,” micro-brothels are quickly becoming common outlets for purchasing sex and keeping trafficking victims concealed, constantly on the move, and difficult to identify and assist. Once again, these victims are forced to meet the