Report highlights connection between sex trafficking and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls

In the summer of 1991, Janice Randhile was coerced by her boyfriend into the sex trade on the streets of Ottawa when she was just 17 years old.

“We had been dating, we were in a relationship, and then he said, ‘I want you to go to work,’” Ms. Randhile, a member of Alberta’s Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, recalled in an interview. “I was like, ‘What?’ I wasn’t homeless, but I didn’t want to go home. So I did it.”

At the time, Ms. Randhile was living with her boyfriend in a rooming house, grappling with fear of abandonment and struggling to find her identity. She is among the Indigenous children who were apprehended from their families and placed in non-Indigenous homes as part of the notorious Sixties Scoop.