Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B. The research, the first of its kind in B. Start your day with a roundup of B. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.
A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Ads were collected from four of the most popular websites in Canada offering escort and sex work services. They also noted that children who are lured and groomed in B. Accurate statistics on sex trafficking are difficult to come by, in part due to the inherently secretive nature of the issue and the varying definitions across jurisdictions.
Limited data and the fact that crimes involving sex are among the least likely to be reported contributes to human trafficking cases rarely resulting in charges in Canada. In , there were reported incidents of human trafficking, according to the report. Of those, only a third resulted in charges and even then, 89 per cent of charges were stayed, withdrawn, discharged or dismissed. Among reported cases of human trafficking, 95 per cent of the victims were women.
Sharifi cautioned that while it was important to understand the extent to which human trafficking was occurring within the sex industry, it was important not to confuse it with consensual sex work. Researchers collected more than 6, sex work ads from four sites in B.
Roughly 1, were manually classified as to whether they contained language associated with trafficking. Those 1, ads were then used to train machine learning models that could identify ads suggesting trafficking and child exploitation from the full data set of ads. Sharifi hopes to expand the research to include social media platforms, where she said the majority of initial grooming for underage sex work first occurs. Sharifi said the ultimate aim of the research is to develop tools that law enforcement can use to continuously monitor internet ads for human tracking and sexual exploitation.
