When Missing Youth Are Not Just Missing: Exploitation Comes In Many Forms
- The White Hatter
- 5 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Recently, we watched a powerful investigative report by CBC’s The Fifth Estate titled “Searching for Ontario’s Missing Black Boys.” (1) It is careful journalism that parents should take seriously. The report examines a disturbing pattern of Black boys from the Greater Toronto Area being reported missing and later located in remote regions of Ontario.
What makes this investigation particularly important is that it challenges a common misconception. Human trafficking is often spoken about only in the context of sexual exploitation. This report shows clearly that trafficking can also involve criminal exploitation, including the coercion of youth into drug distribution networks. It should be noted that this is what Darren also saw in his 30 years of policing.
Some experts featured in the investigation called for human trafficking charges against adults who lure Black boys into these roles. That call deserves thoughtful consideration, but also comes with investigative and legal challenges for police and Crown to prove.
According to the investigative report, criminal networks target teens using promises that appeal directly to adolescent vulnerabilities such as money, belonging, status, and a sense of purpose. Youth are then moved far from home into unfamiliar communities, often in northern Ontario, where they are isolated, dependent, and exposed to serious risk.
Families of these teens boys described fear, confusion, and frustration when initial responses to missing reports to police felt slow or dismissive. Community advocates raised concerns that these cases were not being treated with the urgency they deserved. The investigation reframes these disappearances not simply as missing person cases, but as potential exploitation involving power imbalances, manipulation, and control. This distinction matters.
In Canada, human trafficking is defined under section 279.01 of the Criminal Code. In plain language, trafficking occurs when a person recruits, transports, receives, holds, conceals, or exercises control, direction, or influence over another person’s movements for the purpose of exploitation.
Exploitation itself is defined under section 279.04. A person is considered exploited if they are caused to provide labour or a service, including criminal activity, in a way that would reasonably make them fear for their safety or the safety of someone they care about.
That fear does not need to come from physical violence alone. It can involve intimidation, manipulation, deception, abuse of power, or threats. The legal test is objective. The court asks whether a reasonable person in that situation would feel afraid, critical points parents often do not hear
Several aspects of this Canadian law are often misunderstood in public conversations:
Movement is not required
A youth can be trafficked without crossing borders or even leaving their city. Many parents still picture human trafficking as something that involves being kidnapped and transported long distances. Canadian law does not see it that way. A young person can be trafficked while attending the same school, living in the same home, and sleeping in the same bed every night.
What matters legally is control, not geography. If an adult or older youth directs where a child goes, who they associate with, how they earn money, or what happens if they refuse, trafficking may already be occurring. This is why some youth are exploited in their own neighbourhoods or online without ever physically relocating.
For parents and caregivers, this reframes risk. The absence of travel does not equal the absence of exploitation.
Consent does not cancel exploitation
Agreeing at the outset does not negate trafficking if control and fear later exist
Another common misunderstanding is that a young person must be forced from the beginning for trafficking to apply. That is not how the law works.
Many exploitative situations start with apparent choice. A teen might agree to deliver packages, sell substances, manage online accounts, or do favours in exchange for money, belonging, or protection. Over time, that “choice” erodes, threats escalate, debts appear, consequences are implied, and fear replaces freedom.
Canadian courts focus on what happens after control is established, not on whether the youth initially said yes. If a reasonable person in that situation would feel unsafe refusing or leaving, exploitation may be present.
This distinction is critical for parents, especially when youth are blamed for their own victimization.
Trafficking is not limited to sex
Criminal exploitation, forced labour, and online-facilitated coercion all qualify. Public conversations often reduce trafficking to sexual exploitation alone. That narrow view leaves many victims invisible.
Under Canadian law, trafficking includes forcing or coercing someone to provide any labour or service. That can include drug distribution, theft, fraud, financial scams, domestic labour, or online activities carried out under pressure or threat.
The Fifth Estate investigation highlights this clearly. Youth were not being exploited sexually, but they were being controlled, isolated, and placed in dangerous criminal environments for the benefit of others.
Online spaces also play a growing role. Coercion can occur through messaging apps, social platforms, or gaming communities, with pressure applied digitally rather than face-to-face.
Parents need to understand that exploitation does not always look the way television portrays it.
Youth receive added legal protection
Offences involving minors carry enhanced penalties
Canadian law recognizes that youth are developmentally different from adults. As a result, offences involving minors carry heavier penalties and additional charges.
Trafficking a person under 18 is treated as an aggravated offence. Courts consider factors such as power imbalance, grooming, manipulation, and the inability of youth to freely exit exploitative relationships.
That said, enhanced protection does not automatically mean easier prosecution. The law still requires evidence of control, influence, and exploitation. The intention is not to criminalize youth or force them into re-traumatizing legal processes, but to hold exploiters accountable when thresholds are met.
For parents and caregivers, this reinforces an important message. The system acknowledges that children need protection, but prevention and early intervention remain far more effective than relying on criminal charges after harm has occurred. Human trafficking is a serious indictable offence in Canada. In some cases, penalties can include life imprisonment, especially when organized crime or youth are involved.
While the call for trafficking charges may be understandable, there is an important legal reality parents and caregivers need to understand:
The law requires proof of control, not just harm
Police must be able to show that an adult exercised control, direction, or influence over a young person for the purpose of exploitation. Vulnerability alone is not enough. Poverty, race, family instability, or association with crime do not meet the legal test on their own.
Officers cannot rely on suspicion or patterns. They need evidence that links a specific adult to deliberate control over a specific youth
Exploitation often looks subtle from the outside
In many cases, there are no chains, locked rooms, or visible injuries. Control is exercised through debt, fear, loyalty, threats to family, or the promise of protection.
From the outside, a youth may appear to be acting independently. However, From the inside, they may feel they have no safe way out. Translating that internal fear into courtroom ready evidence is extremely difficult
Youth disclosure is often the critical missing piece
In trafficking cases involving minors, victim testimony is often central to proving exploitation. Without a disclosure explaining how fear, pressure, or control was applied, police may not meet the evidentiary threshold.
Many youth do not disclose because they are afraid of retaliation, worried about being criminalized, loyal to the exploiter, or distrustful of authorities due to past negative experiences.
Police cannot compel a young person to testify or relive trauma simply to build a case.
Fear is real, but hard to document
The legal test asks whether a reasonable person in the same situation would fear for their safety. Fear does not always come with threats that are recorded or written down. It may be implied. It may be learned through witnessing violence toward others. It may be enforced through silence rather than words. Courts require evidence that this fear existed and influenced behaviour, which is often hard to prove after the fact.
Criminal networks are designed to insulate themselves
Those who exploit youth often structure operations so that distance exists between decision makers and victims. Orders are passed through intermediaries, payments are informal, and communication is intentionally vague.
This makes it hard to establish who was truly exercising control, even when exploitation is clearly occurring.
When trafficking charges are not laid, it does not mean police did not believe harm occurred. It often means the legal standard could not be met without causing more harm to the young person. This is why prevention, early intervention, trusted relationships, and community awareness matter so much. Once exploitation reaches this stage, options narrow.
The challenge is not a lack of concern, it’s the reality of how the law is structured to balance accountability with protection. To lay a human trafficking charge, police must be able to prove that an adult exercised control, direction, or influence over a young person for the purpose of exploitation. Vulnerability alone is not enough. Association with criminal activity alone is not enough. This fact is often the missing link in proceeding with charges given that the survivor is often reluctant to provide a statement to police to support such a charge given their fear of retribution by their trafficker if they do. Police cannot compel a young person to testify or to relive traumatic experiences simply to satisfy an evidentiary standard. This is not a lack of concern, it’s a reflection of the safeguards built into the justice system to protect victims from further harm.
This investigative reporting reminds us of something we emphasize often at The White Hatter, “Youth do not need to be naive or reckless to be exploited. They need only to be targeted at the right moment, by the right person, with the right pressure.”
Protecting youth and teens is not just about warning them about danger. It is about helping them understanding how exploitation actually works, how power and manipulation operate, and how the law responds once harm has occurred.
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