The dark side of B.C.'s capital: 'They can literally groom hundreds of youth at one time, just with a keyboard'

Children targeted by sex traffickers in Victoria Experts say children as young as 11 are being exploited in the capital, in the third installment of CTV's human trafficking series.

Victoria — This is the fifth story in Hidden in Plain Sight: an in-depth series exploring human trafficking and its connection to British Columbia. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here and Part 4 here.

Warning: The contents may be disturbing to some readers

The picturesque city that is B.C.'s capital has an unseen sinister side that many people are not even aware of.

Human trafficking is on the rise in Victoria, experts tell CTV News.

“It’s really bad. We have seen a sharp increase over the last few years,” explained Mia Golden, a youth and family counsellor with Mobile Youth Services Team (MYST).

“It’s a common thing we come across that people don’t know that sex trafficking happens here in Victoria. It happens in every community,” she said.

“What we’re noticing (is) there’s a definite connection between pornography and the drive for demand,” she added.

Golden, along with a Victoria police officer, form a unique team that hits the streets day after day, trying to connect with vulnerable youth.

“We have many, many 12-year-olds on our caseload,” she explained.

“We have had 11-year-olds on our caseload. And we are seeing younger than 11 being groomed for exploitation,” she said, explaining she has seen grooming start with children as young as nine.

She said targeted children end up “going through absolutely horrendous things that they shouldn’t be, and then we’re talking to the family members and they are slowly losing their children and they don’t know how to get them back."

CTV News rode along with Golden and Victoria police officer Gord Magee last fall. Magee has since moved to a different unit within the Victoria Police Department.

“One of the hotspots we end up going to is malls because malls are a big hub for recruiting and for gang activity and for exploitation,” said Magee.

But the recruiting also starts online.

“They can literally groom hundreds of youth at one time, just with a keyboard,” Golden explained.

Either way, victims often end up being slowly reeled in, “love bombed” with gifts and attention from a trafficker who is pretending to be their boyfriend.

“They will make it look like a relationship. It will feel like a relationship to the young person. Often, they will isolate the young person away from their friends, from their family members. And then the next strategy they will use is to get them using drugs,” she said.

And once addicted, she said, victims often feel like there’s no way out.

“It is such a manipulative tool, because the young person will be groomed to believe it is their decision. ‘Well, you want the drugs, I am just doing you a favour,’” Golden said.

“And it’s a vicious circle because they get trafficked, they get pimped out and then they use more drugs to squash the pain and often while they’re being trafficked, they experience a lot of violence," she explained, adding that sometimes traffickers will also threaten victims' family members.

Victims are trafficked out of hotels or Airbnbs, moving from place to place, sometimes from city to city.

“Victoria is one of the stops in what’s known as a … circuit. So, there are sex traffickers from across Canada who will bring girls throughout … often it's based on events like sports events,” she said.

As part of their routine, the police and counsellor team checks in at homeless encampments, looking for missing youth.

Their work has uncovered teenage girls being held in tents against their will and trafficked.

Golden said it also happens in SROs.

“There have been times when young people have been held in SROs and then been able to escape or have been sexually assaulted or traded for drugs,” she said.

Despite what the team has seen, they said trafficking remains under-reported.

Data from Statistics Canada shows just 570 incidents in all of Canada reported to police in 2023.

“Survivors are quite reluctant to come forward for fear of reprisals, for fear of further violence happening to them. Even fear of violence to their own families,” said Magee.

Victoria police Sgt. Matt King, who works with the department's Special Victims Unit, said cases of human trafficking require complex investigations.

“We’re proving transporting (a) person place to place, withholding items from them. Quite often, the survivors of these types of offences are deeply entrenched with the person that’s trafficking them,” he said.

In the decades since MYST formed, the teams are estimated to have helped hundreds of young people who are being trafficked.

But Golden admits the job takes its toll.

“We hear the most horrendous stories and it’s all with youth, all with young people,” she said.

But the team remains dedicated to the cause, saying the greatest reward is helping a young person find a way out.

This project was made possible with funding provided by the Lieutenant Governor’s B.C. Journalism Fellowship in partnership with Government House Foundation and the Jack Webster Foundation.