This operation started at Toronto police headquarters an hour earlier, with officers scouring hundreds of online sex ads looking for evidence of exploitation. The unit’s mandate is to find young, often underage girls forced to work in the sex trade — and one of the signs they look for in these ads is “branding.”
That’s when a young woman has a tattoo on her chest or some other fairly visible part of her body that “shows they are property of the pimp,” says one officer with a burly build and the protective air of a big brother.
“It’s very, very animalistic,” he says, his voice tinged with disgust. “When you think of it, cows get branded. Farmers do it to identify their own property.” As an example, he shows a provocative ad of a scantily clad young woman with an Air Jordan tattoo on her collarbone.