While crimes like human trafficking operate in the shadows, often out of plain sight, one local woman has spent the past few years trying to cast light on the issue by openly sharing her horrific experiences.
Rama First Nation’s Krystal Brooks, 30, managed to permanently escape human trafficking in 2020, after being subjected to coercive and predatory trafficking situations around the country for long stretches of her life.
Since then, she has been passionate and outspoken about the issue, openly sharing her experiences online, through local media outlets, and by engaging in politics at all levels.
Brooks has recently been meeting with Orillia city councillors to find ways to address human trafficking and the underlying issues that can lead to it and ran as the Green Party candidate for Simcoe North during the most recent provincial and federal elections.
“I am angry, not only that these things happened to me and people that I love, but that these things keep happening to other people,” Brooks said. “I'm an impatient person, so I want to see things done now – and quickly – (but) that's not how these things are dealt with.
“There's so many factors that all need to kind of come into play in really addressing this issue, because it boils down to adequate and affordable housing, food security and mental health and addiction care,” she said.
Though she has made great strides forward, Brooks said her path to this point has not been easy.
An ‘insidious’ crime
Kim Kneeshaw, executive director at North Simcoe Victim Services, said human traffickers deliberately seek out people – usually women – in extremely vulnerable situations.
Often, they’ll frequent bus stations or coffee shops, build trust with their chosen “targets” over time through friendliness, financial assistance, or other material help –either themselves or through other women – before changing their tone and entrapping them, she said.
“It is just absolutely insidious, and they're brilliant, and they're the masters at it,” Kneeshaw said. “If (you) don't have an addiction, they'll give you one, and then that's another thing that you owe them for, and they can control you by controlling the drug that they now have you addicted to.”
Trafficking can take a variety of forms, whether through exploiting victims for labour, sex work, or even their organs, Kneeshaw said.
For Brooks, a variety of traumas from her early life left her vulnerable to traffickers.
She lived in foster care until age three, experiencing neglect and sexual abuse, and she subsequently struggled with mental health issues and connecting with others through her youth.
“I think that when you have multiple traumas like that, it impacts … your risk of falling into those situations, makes you more vulnerable,” she said.
For several years of her adolescence, Brooks was sex trafficked across the country, as far away as Montreal and Newfoundland, during which time she became addicted to hard drugs, as well.
On and off, for the better part of a decade, Brooks endured predatory and coercive environments – even locally.
After she had her two sons in her early twenties, Brooks was doing relatively well, she said, but then had a landlord who took advantage of her need for housing by waiving her rent in exchange for sexual favours.
Though she previously had her own apartment, the owners sold the property, which left Brooks scrambling to find a new home.
“I responded to an ad, and I had been actively looking for probably about two months for an apartment,” she said. “You're in, probably, one of the most desperate places you'll be when you need housing on such short notice like that, especially when you have kids, because you need it (and) you can't be on the streets with children.”
Brooks stayed in that apartment for close to a year, she said, and the coercive nature of that environment grew in scale over that time.
“When I wanted to end all of that, that's when the threats all started, and he threatened to call the cops on me,” she said. “My understanding was there was no protections for prostitutes, which there was.”
Brooks escaped that situation by moving in with her then-boyfriend, but would ultimately fall victim to exploitation over the next several years, as well.
She previously wrote to OrilliaMatters about a woman who targeted and befriended her while staying in a shelter, and ultimately brought her back into sex work. At first, she was paid for that arrangement, but soon enough the money stopped coming to her.
Kneeshaw said it’s common for traffickers to leverage the behaviour of victims against them, among a host of measures used to keep victims from escaping.
“That's a big thing, because your traffickers convinced you that you're going to get arrested, that you're going to be in as much trouble as they are, which is absolutely not the case, but that's the lies that they're telling her, right?” she said.
The difficulty of escaping
Orillia OPP Const. Derek Tilley said human trafficking can be difficult for police departments to enforce.
Since December 2021, police services across Ontario have laid 72 human trafficking charges and assisted 61 victims, and 17 human trafficking investigations were carried out in the OPP’s Central Region in 2022 alone.
However, Tilley noted victims of trafficking are unlikely to reach out to police for support.
Indigenous women, like Brooks, make up about 50 per cent of human trafficking victims in Canada, despite accounting for less than five per cent of the population.
“Human trafficking victims are often from extremely vulnerable populations,” Tilley said. “You see migrant workers, new immigrants, Indigenous women, at-risk youth, those who are socially or economically disadvantaged. We rarely are able to identify them, nor do they feel comfortable coming to authorities.”
The OPP works with a variety of law enforcement agencies at provincial and national levels to gather intelligence, he said, and they keep their eyes out for key indicators someone might be getting trafficked.
Should a victim be identified, Tilley said the OPP proceeds with an investigation and connects victims to the appropriate service organizations to help them escape trafficking.
“There's several signs that we look for … that may include someone refusing to disclose information, or (providing) false information, if they're unable to indicate where they are living or give their address, identify their last location, upcoming destination, travelling with a lack of or limited luggage,” he said.
Identifying and enforcing human trafficking offences, however, is just one part of the equation.
Both Kneeshaw and Brooks spoke to the tremendous personal burden of escaping human trafficking situations as a victim.
Because of the insidious nature of the crime, Brooks said she did not understand she was being trafficked for a number of years.
“In my mind, I understood that I was a prostitute, but that's it,” Brooks said. “The belief that you’re there and it’s consensual is so ingrained into you by the individuals that are doing it to you that you believe you have (a) choice when you really don't.”
When the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report came out in 2019, Brooks said she shared some of her experiences with someone, who quickly pointed out she had been trafficked.
“We started having more conversations about it, and I understood it for what it really was,” she said. “It was really almost traumatizing myself, having to come to terms with what actually happened.”
Brooks did not feel comfortable approaching the OPP with her story, and in 2020 she reached out to the Rama Police Service for help, though she ultimately had to work with OPP during the process.
“I had a really phenomenal officer that just advocated to the max for me, along with the Rama victim services worker,” she said. “I had to deal with it through that system, which was really frustrating, but … it kind of worked out in the end.
“I wasn't really ready to fully deal with it in that way, so that was really hard.”
By that time, Brooks had already managed to get sober by seeking help, and she said a variety of people, both professional and otherwise, contributed to getting her where she is today.
However, recalling her traumatic experiences throughout the process, and into the present, has made recovery a daunting task.
“There (were) moments where I was doing really good, but then I'd have to share really, really hard things, and then I would be five steps backwards, so it was constantly moving forward and then taking several steps backwards,” she said.
Building community
As difficult as it can be, Kneeshaw said the more human trafficking victims build healthy communities around them, the more likely they are to succeed in reclaiming their lives.
She said Brooks’ story is a unique example of someone leveraging their experiences for positive change.
“You don't hear about a whole lot of people having the fortitude to be able to speak out about it,” she said. “It's fantastic when people are able to be like Krystal and share their story and speak out about it because it just helps provide more education and information to those that (are) trafficked.
“Not everyone is able to do that.”
Brooks’ path out of human trafficking mirrors Kneeshaw’s sentiments.
“It really, really boiled down to the support, and just people building me up and empowering me, to just constantly telling me that I'm worth it,” Brooks said. “There's so many people that were very temporary in my life, but they all made an impact. They all really made such a huge difference. In the end it was all those dominoes, I guess, falling into place.”
Although sharing her experiences can be difficult, Brooks said being open and connecting with other victims has been worth it, and she hopes her story can help bring broader changes and encourage individuals to step forward with their own stories.
“You start paying attention to other victims and other survivors out there, and you want to be surrounded by them. You want to listen to their stories because it helps you feel that semblance of normalcy that you maybe don't feel in your life,” she said. “For me, I think it's trying to normalize a really traumatic issue.
“So many people just live in that silence because of the fear of judgment or rejection.”
Police reported over 3,500 cases of human trafficking in Canada between 2011 and 2021, and–according to Kneeshaw–62 per cent of cases in 2022 took place in Ontario.
