Pedophilia In Vancouver, And In Native Residential Schools.

Dr. Jennifer Wade is a founder of Amnesty International in Vancouver, and was a witness to my railroading out of the United Church for exposing these crimes against children: An Excerpt from her Keynote Address on April 30, 1999:

More and more in recent years we have been learning that one does not need to go far field to hear of the sexual exploitation of children and youth. It is a very, very serious problem right here in Vancouver. In March 1997, no less a paper than the Christian Science Monitor highlighted the flourishing sex trade with children, right here in Vancouver, referring to the city as "a pedophile's paradise," a place known for its "notorious sex trade," and saying that Vancouver has gained an international reputation "as a city where it is easy to find a child for sex."

Child advocates in the city put the numbers of such children in the hundreds and say that 25% of the sex trade workers start at age 14 or younger. Chaplain Al Mayall of the Union Gospel Mission, commenting on this sex trade "that creeps into and destroys the lives of young people," scoffs at the word "consenting," saying, "The sex trade is about exploitation, not mutual consent." These people, he says, are victims who "pay dearly with their lives."

Although there has been an attempt since 1997 to emphasize the arresting of the sex customers rather than the juveniles involved, there have been very few arrests to date, and the problem continues to escalate. Recently, adding to the sordidness of the story, the disappearance of young women in Vancouver has also increased (21 since 1995). Responsible police officials with whom I spoke this week have even said they would not be surprised if one or more serial killer existed. This is very chilling.

In January of this year, the Vancouver Courier published an article entitled "Coming on to our Children" (January 31, 1999). For many, it was no doubt a wake-up call first of all to read that this was happening in their neighbourhoods, and secondly, to find out what people working in the court systems have known for a long time: that many of the people involved were churchmen, lawyers, businessmen, and possibly neighbours whom they probably know. They would also perhaps be surprised to read that children as young as 12 were being lured into the sex trade in such places as upscale shopping malls and schoolyards. The article also made another important point. It indicated that once children are drawn into a grotesque, deviant subculture with a language and, yes, even a sense of community of its own, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape.

However, the sex trade in children is not a recent happening in Vancouver. While doing some research for this presentation, I came across the affidavit of a Cree lawyer named Renate Andres-Auger who filed an affidavit in April 1994 naming prominent legal personalities and the BC Law Society for destroying her legal practice and libeling and slandering her (I have a copy of that affidavit listing prominent plaintiffs with me).

Renate Auger alleged this happened partly because of her knowledge of pedophile rings operating out of the Vancouver Club and out of resorts in Whistler. In a very bizarre scene as it was described in the papers I discovered, Ms. Auger and her lawyer, Jack Cram, were first not listened to in the court, and then were handcuffed and dragged out of

the courtroom to a jail cell. When Jack Cram eventually did speak, he put before the judge some of his allegations involving cover-ups by the head officers of the Law Society and the judiciary to aid and abet pedophiles and drug dealers. When he insisted on giving more details on radio, Jack Cram was met by 10 policemen upon his return from a radio station. He was then put into an ambulance and taken to the psychiatric ward of Vancouver General Hospital. He believes he was injected again and again with mind disorienting drugs.

The Cram/Andres-Auger story, to this day, remains a very strange and fearful tale of alleged corruption and pedophilia in high places. It is also a story which has never yet been completely told. Perhaps if it were, along with a few other strange stories, we as Canadians would have little reason to gasp at the exposure of pedophile rings in Belgium operating in high places two years ago. The matter of cover-ups possibly existing for those in high places in Canada is becoming more and more credible as more and more people speak out.

But the sex trade in children, especially young Native children, goes back much further than the time of Renate Andres-Auger. This became a very real fact to me, unthinkable as it was, last June 12 to 14 when I happened to attend a Tribunal arranged by a UN affiliate group here in Vancouver to hear testimonies of Native people who had attended the church-run residential schools. Although I have been associated with Amnesty International since its beginnings in 1961, I must admit that what I heard at that Tribunal was horribly disturbing and shattering. I am still haunted by the disturbing accounts given of little children, aged 5 and 6, being taken from their parents and grandparents by police who took them in gunboats to schools, some of them never to see their homes or their villages again.

Not only were tales recounted of unfathomable cruelty and torture to little children dragged away from their homes and put under the legal guardianship of church-run schools, but even worse were the accounts given of pedophile groups consisting of church men and women administering what were called "white vitamins" to little children of 9 and 10 who were taken one by one to the so-called infirmary at night. Few of them recalled what happened next except that when they came to, they often saw blood on a sheet and remembered experiencing great pain.

Harriet Nahanee, a Native elder, has given the police her story of hearing a young child called Maisie Williams crying on Christmas Eve for her mother after being with one of the alleged pedophiles at the Port Alberni School. And then Ms. Nahanee testified that this child was pushed down the basement steps to where Harriet Nahanee was herself hiding. This young girl is reported by Ms. Nahanee to have died, and this is confirmed in a copy of the school records I have seen. Ms. Nahanee herself alleges she was molested time and time again by the principal of the school, a Rev. Caldwell, who has since died. And the police therefore claim they can take no action on her story. Other women at the Tribunal testified to "being cleaned up" on a Saturday night and being taken often by Native people themselves to clients. One person mentioned the Vancouver Club.

At this same Tribunal, a Native man spoke abut being taken home by a teacher at Christmas and then being given alcohol before being sexually molested. The names of many Reverends, Sisters, Fathers, and Brothers were given as story after story of terrifying sexual exploitation and cruelty was told. To run away was to risk merciless beatings with electrical wires and horse harnesses - perhaps even death in the barns, one man said. All of this is on record. How prevalent such cases were, one can only guess.

Certainly everyone here tonight should think carefully upon the figures given in the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginals that 125,000 children went into those schools and 50,000 never came out. We can only guess what those children, both boys and girls, were subjected to. Undoubtedly, only part of the anguish was sexual exploitation, but it was a very horrible part that has remained an enduring nightmare for many of the victims. Certainly, as one listened amid the sobbing and the anguish at that Tribunal to stories being told of all kinds of sexual predators and perverts, one realized that these schools, often in remote places with inaccessible transportation, must have been havens for sexual perverts and pedophiles.

But it is not Native children in residential schools across the land who alone suffered such abuse. We are finding out as people dare to come forward that reform schools and schools for deaf and blind children were also such havens for pedophiles. Unfortunately, class action suits to get to the real story of sexual exploitation in all these places have been few and far between, and in many instances, positively discouraged. One man, a Mr. Plint at the Port Alberni School, was charged in a class action suit, but this man, it would

seem, was but a "fall guy." There were many Mr. Plints out there. How can we today possibly think our society could come out of such cruelty and misery unscathed? Of course there is a price to pay in terms of broken lives and on-going misery and hopelessness. Even worse, those who were sexually abused as children confessed with anguish and even disbelief at that Tribunal to being abusers themselves now, often of their own children. People, of course, tend to pass on what they themselves know.

No, we do not need to go far from home to know the underbelly of that "niceness" we so often associate with Canadians. It is perhaps that very niceness which allows horrific things to go on without questioning, things like pedophile rings. More and more I see complacency and a degree of self-satisfaction as real problems in our midst, a hotbed for allowing some pretty sinister things to take place. There are instances of those who have tried to tell the truth being silenced in one way or another, particularly when the truth pertains to those in positions of power. When complaints have been made, authorities have said it is not in the public interest to investigate. And by and large, ordinary people do not seem concerned enough to ask the necessary questions.

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