Scotian - Operations - Sex Trafficking - Methodology

Methodology

Commercial sexual exploitation and prostitution are NPF's primary activities. NPF is one of the most well-known sex trafficking gangs in Canada, and their sex trafficking activities stretch back at least as far as the 1990s. NPF is one of the few HRM-based gangs that has a presence further west in Canada, and most of these gangs' activities outside of the HRM relate to sex trafficking. Perrin argues in Invisible Chains that NPF's relationship with motorcycle gangs is one of competition for control of domestic sex trafficking. Before NPF's expansion into Quebec and southwestern Ontario, motorcycle gangs had controlled sex trafficking in both provinces, but the police had organized major operations to combat these motorcycle gangs, leaving NPF to largely take control of the regional sex industry.

The PRP is Canada's leading police force in the investigation of human trafficking. In 1995, this police force took down another gang that was similar to NPF in its trafficking of young Nova Scotian women into Ontario; in that case, the PRP arrested seven people and issued more than 60 charges. The PRP has investigated the NPF and claims that the gang engages in the trafficking of children, specifically girls. According to the PRP, NPF members live off the earnings of those they procure into prostitution. Chettleburgh has asserted that NPF also controls many girls who work for strip clubs and escort agencies.

NPF members use only a little physical manipulation and a lot of psychological manipulation in controlling the girls and young women they sexually exploit; in this way, NPF's tactics are both effective and comparable to those of many other sex trafficking gangs. Gang members groom the girls, often by approaching them as boyfriends. The PRP suggests that men in the gang often groom three or four girls at the same time without the girls finding out about each other. After grooming a girl in Halifax, her NPF boyfriend has her travel to Niagara-on-the-Lake by way of Peel, Ontario to live in a motel. He then convinces her to work at a strip club in order to help finance the purchase of a condominium in which the two of them might then live. The condominium is a ruse, however. At the strip club, the girl is expected to make $1,000 each night and is not allowed to leave the club until she has done so. This requirement pressures many of the girls into prostitution in the clubs themselves. While performing arrests in these clubs, police officers have seen girls text their pimps in order to beg for permission to leave the club, and the pimps respond stating the requirement that each girl must make $1,000 every night. The girls are also pressured into prostitution by way of violence, intimidation, or threats. For example, the man might threaten to kill the girl's parents. In this way, the gang forces girls into prostitution and into stripping. When a girl tries to get out of prostitution, her pimp demands a fee before she can leave; this fee can be as high as $5,000. One young woman who told the police about how she had been trafficked was subsequently threatened by several of her traffickers, and she therefore retracted her statement, claiming that the police had manipulated her into a false accusation. In response, one police officer recommended that future victims who make statements to the police should be kept away from their pimps and their pimps' associates; this officer stated that sex trafficking victims are used to being under hourly surveillance by their traffickers, and that therefore, once they have made a statement to the police, they need to have constant human contact simply in order to replace the constant contact they previously had with their traffickers.