Human Trafficking

• Author: Loree Armstrong Beniuk, Jo-Anne Hughes, and Jack Reynolds
• Pages: 13-18

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Human Tracking

—It was a horric series of crimes—a -year-old girl coerced into

prostitution, forcibly conned, raped and tortured. . . .

Rye [the tracker] was an escort and met the girl at a party in May . A few

months later, Rye and the girl were at a man’s apartment when the man accused

the girl of stealing $,.

Later, the girl was visiting a friend when Rye and another woman arrived and

asked the girl to come outside. She was told to get in a car. She sat between two

men and was asked, “Where’s the money?” . . .

Rye then drove the girl to the man’s apartment where the money had gone

missing. Rye slapped her and the man burned her with a lighter. e girl said she

was blindfolded, tied up, waterboarded and raped, although Rye was not implicated

in those crimes.

e man who lived in the apartment urged the girl to come up with a plan to

repay the $,. She was coerced to work as a prostitute, with all the money going

to the man.

Over the next week, Rye drove the girl to many appointments where she per-

formed sexual acts.

[Some weeks later,] when the girl arrived at the appointment at a hotel in Lon-

don, Ont., she called her mother, who arranged for family members to pick her up.

She ed the hotel room and hid in a hotel bathroom until relatives arrived and took

her to safety.

“One thing you never took from her was courage,” the girl’s mother told Rye. “She

had the courage to escape, the courage to speak up, the courage to face those who

brutally wronged her and unending courage to continue through this justice system.”

—Gordon Paul, “‘You Stole Her Trust’: Kitchener Woman Gets Four Years in

Prison for Human Tracking of 15-year-old girl” Waterloo Region Record

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