[h=1]Canada’s Sex Traffickers: C2C’s Investigative Report[/h] By:
Tamara Cherry on June 15, 2010 |
It has been more than twenty years since Kimberly Ann McAndrew vanished after leaving her cashier job at a Canadian Tire in Halifax.
It was August 12, 1989 and in the months that followed, a small handful of local authorities would come to believe that the 19-year-old daughter of a retired RCMP officer had been kidnapped by pimps from the small community of North Preston. The rural cluster of dead-end roads about a half-hour northeast of Halifax was, as it seemingly continues to be, a largely ignored breeding ground for gangsters that cooked up a specialty in running girls.
Nearly 1,800 kilometres away, in what was becoming the epicenter of pimp crackdowns, Toronto Police Juvenile Task Force head Dave Perry was skeptical of the theory brewing among his East Coast counterparts. Girls aren’t just abducted into this game, Perry thought. He had seen how it worked in Toronto: Seduction, coercion, the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship that convinces vulnerable teens that they are fighting for corner space and selling their bodies for the good of the relationship.
Perry’s team had identified what they called The Triangle: Girls and young women were moved between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal at the hands of their pimps who took every penny earned on the corner. In the early 1990s, Nova Scotia became part of that equation.
“In Toronto, we were hearing a lot about these Halifax pimps and how violent they are and how they’re taking girls, moving them all across Canada, down to the United States,” Perry recalls.
