OLDS — Human trafficking, in which people lure other people away and into the sex trade or forced labour, is not something that happens elsewhere. It has been demonstrated to be a risk right in the Mountain View County area, a recent speaker at a special church event in Olds, says.
Children – mostly girls — are at risk of trafficked as early as 13 years old and children as young as five can be exposed to pornography.
Those were just a few messages given out by Sundre-area resident Naomi Holland during a recent Lenten talk at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church.
Holland runs a website about human trafficking called Redeemed With Purpose.
Holland says for 18 years, she worked with victims of human trafficking in Calgary and in Nepal.
During her March 13 talk, Holland spoke for just over 90 minutes.
Afterwards, she did an interview with the Albertan during which she went over some of her main points.
She said human trafficking has been around for a long, long time, but the internet, with its ability to be anonymous or not reveal who you really are has been a godsend for traffickers.
“The average age of entry into sexual exploitation is 13 in Canada,” Holland said.
Holland stressed that human trafficking can occur anywhere.
She cited a case where at about 4 a.m. one night, a man was arrested after running a stop sign in Didsbury. Police alleged he was just yards away from meeting a young girl who allegedly would have been absorbed into the human trafficking world.
Holland said human traffickers prey on people – usually young women – who feel alone and abandoned. They often come from single-parent and/or broken homes.
The traffickers are skilled at appearing to give these girls the love they don’t feel at home.
Then, when they see an opening, they persuade them send explicit photos of themselves. The next step is to take them away and get them into the sex trade.
However, Holland said there are things parents or guardians can do to prevent this from happening.
They include avoiding providing kids with phones for as a long as possible. If a phone has to be provided, she recommends it be a flip phone.
“Kids do not need smart devices. Their brains cannot handle it. It is too much information too fast,” Holland said.
“Our brains were never designed for that level of stimuli. And kids, we see how quickly they get addicted.”
If necessary, she said, “they can borrow yours from time to time for limited things.”
She also recommended going through phones and ensuring all the parental controls available are turned on.
Other rules listed by Holland are:
Never allow kids to be on their phones behind closed doors.
And don’t allow them to use earphones.
“You have to be listening to the conversation and you have to be able to look on the chat, find out who they’re chatting with and look at the chat for inappropriate conversation requests, especially when they request to take the conversation to somewhere more private,” she said, adding that often happens on various games like Roblox and Fortnite.
“They establish the friendship, they make contact there, then they take them somewhere more private, where they can exchange information, including photos,” Holland said.
Holland said pornography on the internet is so pervasive it’s virtually certain children will see it.
“They say on Youtube, within 45 minutes, you will see pornography,” she said.
Because pornography is so pervasive, Holland said on average, children as young as nine years old will “stumble upon it.”
However she said parents have to educate children as young as five years old about its dangers.
“A school bus is one of the number 1 places where they will first see it, because there’s no parent or no adult supervision and there’s a whole bunch of kids of different age ranges who have smart devices,” Holland said.
“So unfortunately a school bus is a high-risk zone for exposure."
Holland said if their young child does see pornography, they should tell an adult and their parents.
“The parent has to be prepared to not be angry, not yell at them. We want to commend them for being brave and for saying something and affirm (to) them that they did the right thing by telling an adult,” she said.
Dangerous as the internet can be, there is also help out there for concerned parents, Holland said.
She recommended that parents go to protectyoungeyes.com, which evaluates the safety of apps for children.
Holland said the pornography industry is unimaginably huge on the internet and benefits from human trafficking. Much of the content can include graphic child abuse, she added.
Holland said in general, men are the ones who watch it and can become addicted to it.
She believes they don’t necessarily mean to get so caught up in that.
“Nobody starts viewing porn with the intention of viewing child abuse,” Holland said. “It’s a slippery slope.
“They started with what they thought was harmless and then it leads to them wanting more and more and more.
“That’s also how the brain works. Their brain needs more content, more graphic, more crude (content) in order to get the same stimulation as (they got from) the very first image that they saw.
“I think these men are struggling. They don’t even like what they’re doing, they just feel so trapped. And there is help – there’s a lot of help for them.
“They need to access one of the many programs out there that will help them break free and to have a life that they actually like and to become a person that they like once again.”
