{"id":17111,"date":"2017-04-26T17:08:39","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T21:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=17111"},"modified":"2017-05-03T15:28:36","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T19:28:36","slug":"two-aurora-men-among-104-charged-in-four-year-child-prostitution-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/two-aurora-men-among-104-charged-in-four-year-child-prostitution-investigation\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Aurora men among 104 charged in four-year child prostitution investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two Aurora men are among 104 charged in Project Raphael, a four-year investigation by the York Regional Police in nabbing men trying to buy sex with children.
\nYork Regional Police (YRP) launched Project Raphael in 2014 to combat child sex trafficking, including rescuing victims, identifying and charging those who traffic children, and identifying and charging those who attempted to purchase sex with children.
\nOver the past four years, their efforts have seen 104 men charged, all of whom Police say made arrangements to purchase sex with a child between the age of 13 and 16. Each of the men responded to online ads for escorts.
\nUnderscoring the prevalence of the demand prostituted children within York Region, Police say in just three days of the investigation this year alone, 19 men were arrested who believed they were purchasing sex from either a 13-year-old or a 14-year old.
\nAnnouncing the results of the ongoing Project Raphael, project lead Det. Sgt. Thai Truong said cases like these are difficult to investigate without gaining the cooperation of victims.
\n\u201cEnlisting their cooperation is very, very difficult,\u201d he said. \u201cGetting them to trust us and tell us what happened is challenging.\u201d
\nProject Raphael was a significant change of course.
\nIn 2012, for instance, Police found that 33 per cent of human trafficking victims rescued were children under the age of 18. Further investigations identified 31 females working in the sex trade across York Region, nine of whom were under the age of 18.
\n\u201cThe alarming concern for us in 2013 was that after interviews and investigations we found that the average age of entry into prostitution was 14.8,\u201d said Truong. \u201cThat was a big concern for us, which really led us to the genesis of how we were going to combat child sex trafficking. [In Project Raphael] we essentially put up advertisements online. When men were looking to purchase sex they were told they were communicating with a prostituted child. We used undercover operators for this investigation and once they were told they were speaking with children, for the most part men would stop and we were okay with that. We really didn\u2019t want to identify any of the men who were not looking to purchase and to buy prostituted children.\u201d
\nOver the course of the investigation, 104 men continued to try and negotiate the price for the purchase of a prostituted child believing they were purchasing a child between 13 and 16 years of age.
\n\u201cThere is no actual child victim in this project,\u201d Truong stressed. \u201cAll of the men were arrested for essentially attempting to purchase prostituted children. If we look at it from another perspective, from a preventative measure, we have stopped 104 men from purchasing 104 children.\u201d
\nAs crimes become more sophisticated, so too must the methods of fighting the problem, added Susan Orlando, Provincial Coordinator of Ontario\u2019s Human Trafficking Prostitution Team. All too often the victims of child sex trafficking do not report or seek assistance from the police. Project Raphael, she said, was a \u201cfine example of proactive and effective policing which matches, and indeed surpasses, the ingenuity of criminals who seek to purchase children for their own sexual gratification.
\n\u201cYoung lives are irrevocably damaged, some completely destroyed and others lost completely,\u201d said Orlando. \u201cExploiting the most vulnerable segments of our society, our children and our youth, for personal gain, whether it is for a John\u2019s sexual gratification or a pimp\u2019s financial gain, is among the most abhorrent criminal conduct and transgression of our moral code that exists in our society today.
\n\u201cFor that reason, those responsible for creating the demand and trafficking underage children will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and brought to justice. The pimps who traffic underage children face significant charges and sentences given the gravity of their conduct when convicted.\u201d
\nBoth Truong and Orlando stressed vigilance at home as well, urging parents to keep a close eye on their children and monitoring what they do, particularly online.
\n\u201cThe pimps will target vulnerable girls.\u201d He said. \u201cIf a child has parental supervision, they have an advantage because they have parents who are supposed to be guiding them and protecting them and monitoring what they do. The problem where risk increases is where they don\u2019t have that supervision and they don\u2019t have that guidance. A lot of the girls might not be as fortunate to have the social supports as other girls.\u201d
\nPolice investigations have found 85 prostituted children working within York Region. Of those 85, police were able to arrest the pimps and traffickers of 49, illustrating just how difficult a problem this is to combat.
\nOf the 104 cases placed before the courts, 40 of the cases have been resolved, and 64 are still before the courts. Aurora resident Ali Mansourinajand is due in court this Thursday, April 27 while Roman Kori will appear on September 25.
\nThe charges have not been proven.
\nOf the 40 cases resolved by the courts, 32 of the accused pled guilty, four went to trial and of those four, three of them were found guilty and one man was acquitted. Five of the 104 cases were withdrawn.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Two Aurora men are among 104 charged in Project Raphael, a four-year investigation by the York Regional Police in nabbing men trying to buy sex with children. York Regional Police (YRP) launched Project Raphael in 2014 to combat child sex trafficking, including rescuing victims, identifying and charging those who traffic children, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/2017-04-27-02.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4rZ","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-25 23:46:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}