City police see sex work moving from streets to online

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This article was published 01/12/2016 (2702 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It used to be that if Winnipeg police officers wanted to help exploited women get out of the sex trade or arrest johns, all they had to do was go for a drive to a few well-known streets. Now, they find most of them in cyberspace.

A report headed to Tuesday’s Winnipeg Police Board meeting says while the Winnipeg Police Service’s counter-exploitation unit made 37 arrests in the third quarter of this year, officers have noted a significant decline in the numbers of sex workers on the street.

Insp. Kelly Dennison said Friday he has seen the sex trade change dramatically in his 27 years of police work.

“Now, you don’t see that many, but I don’t want the public to think sexual exploitation is not that big of a problem in the city,” he said. “It’s actually the opposite; they’re just out of sight now.”

Dennison said computers and the Internet have allowed the problem to migrate inside, behind closed doors.

The Winnipeg Outreach Network, a community organization offering assistance to people trapped in the sex trade, is also reporting a massive reduction in the number of sex workers “exploited at street level,” he said, adding the trend has forced police online.

Signy Arnason, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s associate executive director and director of Cybertip.ca, has observed the same transition.

“The crimes have evolved, but a lot of crime has moved online,” Arnason said. “People use the Internet for positive purposes, but they also use it for illegal acts.”

Arnason said although the Internet has made exploitation less visible, it offers investigators new benefits.

“We can now see the evidence of the crime,” she said. “We didn’t have images of the proof of the abuse before, but now we have very serious evidence. Before you’d be relying on the testimony of abused children.

“There is now a record online.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca