How Callie Love is transforming her trauma into strategies to end human sex trafficking 

Content Warning: This story details graphic examples of sexual abuse involving minors some readers may find disturbing.

People have told her she’s crazy. 

They have told her not to try. They have said there’s no point, that there’s no support, the funding will never flow.

Callie doesn’t see any other way. 

She was still a teenager, not yet an adult, when she was sex trafficked for two months. She knows Canada needs champions to stand up and demand change for survivors, to demand change so other young women are not victimized in the first place. 

“I don’t care, I will fight and I will fight no matter how hard I have to, because this is something that needs to happen.”

She’s referring to the creation of a localized centre for survivors of human trafficking. Not just a shelter. Not just a community support hub; a place where survivors of human trafficking can receive the wraparound support that is so often talked about, but never fully materializes due to funding inadequacies and geographic separation. 

Things are just too spread out. 

From Thunder Bay to Ottawa, the Ontario government is under-spending on social support services by $3.7 billion annually according to the provincial Financial Accountability Office.

After escaping her trafficker Callie has not only worked to rebuild her life from trauma and addiction, she has dedicated countless hours to understand the gaps in the systems meant to help survivors like her. 

Using the information gathered through hundreds of interviews with frontline workers, other survivors and social service providers from across the world, Callie launched her non-profit agency, Phoenix Arise Foundation, to help educate the public and eventually fill the gaps that swallow so many other women. 

While human sex trafficking does impact men and members of the LGBTQ+ community, the vast majority of victims and survivors are young women—93 percent of the 3,558 victims reported by police between 2013 and 2023 were women and girls. Nearly a quarter of them (23 percent) were under the age of 18. 

In its current format, the tattered web of underfunded services is not convincing enough for survivors to believe that if they leave their trafficker—often the person providing them with food, shelter and enabling their addictions — the support system will be strong enough to catch them. 

“They feel like there’s nothing left, and it’s hard, it’s very hard.”

Callie is attempting to change that narrative.

“Healing is not linear, and survival is not enough—we deserve to thrive,” she says. “That is why I founded Phoenix Arise Foundation: to ensure that no survivor is left behind, that no one has to fight this battle alone. We are building something greater than ourselves—a future where survivors have the support, the resources, and the opportunities they need to reclaim their lives.”

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer)

“I had told my mom, I told CAS, I told my pappa, I told the police. My mom ended up basically, during fights and stuff, saying it was my fault.”

When Callie was only three years old, her babysitter began sexually exploiting her. He was able to carry out the abuse for six years. 

Every Wednesday and on weekends, her mother would drop her off and Daniel Jarvis would take pictures of her; force her to touch herself, or watch pornography online and have her replicate what she saw. He documented it, and put it on a dark web server. 

She tried to tell her mother what was happening. But the babysitter was a close friend, and it was like she didn’t want to listen, Callie says. 

When she was 11, the police showed up at her door. 

Jarvis had been simultaneously abusing two other children—and got caught. He got two years in jail for those charges, but Callie’s case wasn’t a part of it. 

Her mother didn’t want to press charges.

”I was very adamant I wanted to go to court, I wanted to press charges against this guy, because by this point I had understood what happened to me,” she says. 

The disagreement opened a rift between Callie and her mother. It led to yelling, to abuse and to Callie being kicked out of the house.

By the age of 13 she was in foster care. Her time in and out of the system was a “mess of an experience” Callie recalls. 

She was placed in a mix-modality home for kids of varying ages with live-in foster parents. It didn’t last long. 

“I left because I saw an eight-year-old get restrained,” she says. “It just kind of gave me that anxiety of ‘I don’t want that to happen to me, so I’m not going to stay here at all.”

She ran away. 

When she could, Callie slept at a friend's house. When she couldn’t, she slept on park benches.

At 14, she re-entered the system, this time in a group home. But the strong familial foundation she yearned for alluded her. She ran away repeatedly, but always found her way back—either returning willingly because it was too cold to sleep on the street, or the police would find her. 

One day in 2014 she ran into an old friend. 

Ashley was a friend from school. They used to skip classes together. She was with her boyfriend, a much older man, but at 14, and looking for adventure and escape, this wasn’t enough of a red flag to keep Callie from dropping into the back of their car.

 “I had no idea what anything would have led to.”

They went to a house in Ajax. There were drinks, and drugs, mostly molly (also known as ecstasy or MDMA), and Callie ended up spending the night.

The next morning, Ashley came into the room and told Callie she would need to pay them back for the drugs and alcohol from the night before, and for the room she slept in. 

As a 14-year-old Crown ward who was basically homeless, Callie had no money, and she told them as much. 

“She’s like, ‘no it’s okay, we have a way you can make the money back.”

She’d become an escort, Ashley explained. She would only have to do a couple calls, earn a bit of money and all would be square. 

“I remember freaking out and being like, ‘what are you telling me?’”

Upset and scared, Callie refused. So they locked her in the bedroom. They convinced her she had no choice. 

After posing for photos, ads were placed on Backpage—a classifieds website that was shut down in 2018 after repeated investigations and charges for its connection to sex trafficking and money laundering— Callie’s exploitation began. 

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer)

Escort services are one of the most common enterprises used by sex traffickers. Through online ads—usually posting under the victim’s name—the trafficker is able to maintain a high degree of anonymity. 

Over 80 percent of adult sex traffickers in Canada are men. But they will often use women they are trafficking to recruit others to be exploited. While a tactic to expand their business, this also makes victims feel complicit, and vulnerable to criminal charges should the trafficker eventually be caught. Callie doesn’t blame Ashley for what happened to her. 

“I realize she was just like me. She was alone, I was probably her only friend who was vulnerable enough and nobody would miss if they went missing,” Callie says. “Even though she shouldn’t have done it, I also don’t hate her for it because I could only imagine how bad it was before I got there, for her.”

It’s a reality that took work on her part to accept. Some in her shoes might not be able to do the same.

Her trafficker had multiple houses in Durham where he was trafficking women. On certain nights there would be parties, the girls there nothing more than slaves. 

One of the men Callie was forced to sleep with was a police officer. 

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘wow, nobody cares.’ Everybody knows that this stuff is just happening. I was very young, and I looked extremely young.”

When she tried to flee, she was caught and beaten. 

She was afraid to try and ask anyone for help. 

“I remember just laying on the bed…my vagina was bleeding because I was just so used and abused. My body just started feeling like it was failing.”

After a month, one man asked if she was okay, if she was there willingly.

The questions terrified her. She thought it could be some kind of test. 

For weeks, her situation got progressively worse. 

“I’d get slapped, I’d get hit, there would be times where I was just like whipped and it just kind of became what my thing was,” Callie says. 

She thought of suicide. She cut herself—reengaing in a habit she’d started when she was only in Grade 4—hoping that men would see the wounds and be turned off. 

No.

Her trafficker still found a way to make money off of her. Selling her to one of his friends with a blood fetish who would touch himself while digging his finger into a wound in her leg.

There was no single moment that changed things for her. She just knew that if she didn’t take action, she could be stuck in that house for good. 

So Callie implemented a tactic of her own. 

She noticed Ashley was given a lot more freedom. She did outcalls. She was allowed to shop and come and go. She acted like she was in love with their trafficker. 

Callie began to do the same.

Cleaning, complimenting him, caring for him. 

Eventually, she was given her first out call—seeing a client somewhere other than the house. 

She was dropped at an Ajax hotel. Shaking with nerves as she planned her escape, she knocked on the door. 

Inside was not a client who had just purchased sex with an underage girl, but officers with the Durham Regional Police. 

“I did not trust that this was legit at all,” Callie says. “So I sat down and they started asking me questions.” 

She lied about her name, she lied about her age.

“They didn’t care, they just let me go.”

Then she fled. 

Escort services are one of the most common forms of sexual exploitation identified by the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking. 

(Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking) 

For the entire two months Callie was held in the Ajax house. Nobody came looking for her. 

The local Children’s Aid Society knew she was gone, yet no Amber Alert was issued. Callie says she was viewed as just another problem child who had run away. 

For a system that has been called a pipeline to human trafficking, there are significant inadequacies that need to be addressed. This has been highlighted by the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS), which recognizes that there is a disturbing pattern of human trafficking victims and survivors crossing paths with the child welfare system. 

Part of this can be a result of the lived experience of children (whether they’ve been abused or neglected), but it’s also a shortcoming of the system, which can create further housing instability, disrupt education, and continue cycles of mistreatment that exacerbate feelings of isolation, the OACAS states in letter sent during consultations for the Ontario government’s anti-human trafficking strategy. 

“I felt failed by everybody,” Callie says.

When she did try to speak to police about what happened. It turned into an interrogation. They pestered her to provide further information about the other girls who were there, showing her pictures to see if she could recognize anyone. She didn’t. But under their constant pressure, she gave in, saying she knew all the women in the photos, although that wasn’t true. 

No charges were ever laid. 

This is not unique to Callie’s story. 

According to data from Statistics Canada, between 2013 and 2023, only 10 percent of human trafficking charges resulted in a finding of guilt. In the majority of cases, charges were either stayed, withdrawn or dismissed. Experts have told The Pointer this is due the justice system’s continued reliance on survivor testimony. Many survivors do not want to be questioned about what happened, or be retraumatized by a defense lawyer grilling them about the minute details of their horrific exploitation. 

(Joel Wittnebel/The Pointer)

Callie is using this horrific life experience as a force for good. 

Phoenix Arise Foundation was launched in April 2024, and while still in its infancy, has begun educating the public and helping survivors. 

Callie and her small team of volunteers delivered 15 workshops reaching 75 people. The team attended 12 events and 46 stakeholder meetings. 

Through her foundation, Callie has helped four survivors, two families and five at-risk youth.

She’s empowered these vulnerable individuals, educating them about human trafficking, online safety and healthy relationships.

“It’s not just working on the prevention of how to keep kids safe, but also how to stop kids from feeling like pimping is glamourized and how to step out of that,” Callie says. 

She’s done it all with zero donations, zero grants and zero government funding. 

The in-depth research and consultations she’s done with hundreds of frontline service providers around the country (and the world) has revealed just how broken Canada’s support system really is. While many big cities and towns across the country dedicate resources to help survivors and victims of other forms of gender-based violence, these services are underfunded, outdated and unable to reach the people they are intended to help. 

“When I started my work I thought there were so many amazing organizations and so many supports out there because I was trafficked 10 years ago, and over the past 10 years the amount of work these organizations in Canada have done is amazing,” Callie says. “So I felt like a kid in a candy store seeing all these shiny new things. But then, the best way I can describe it is, you look at the candy and its all expired, the organizations are either underfunded, their waitlists are too long, they’re too spread out, or they’re only in the big cities, there’s nothing covering the small towns or these other areas that actually need help as well.”

All of her work coalesced into the vision for an all-in-one centre to help survivors with all their diverse needs. 

Who is helping connect survivors with therapy? Helping them find a job? Ensuring they can keep that job? A lot of survivors have very low financial literacy, who can teach them about that? What about basic cooking and cleaning skills? All skills a typical kids will learn through a healthy childhood, but not survivors.

“These are literal children who are being pulled out of their childhood and put into sexual exploitation and then society expects them to just be able to pick up like a normal person and get a job, and be be able to be stable and keep that house and keep that job, but they're not equipped with the skills to be able to do that.”

A centre that could offer training in these types of skills in coordination with a safe place to live would be unprecedented. 

Callie wants to expand a survivor’s independence by teaching homesteading and growing their own food. She wants to offer classes for the partners of survivors to teach them about being in a relationship with someone with complex trauma.

“It is very hard to explain to your partner that a word they might say might trigger you, especially if you’re doing intimate stuff, how to properly make everything safe for a person who has been through so much,” she says. 

It’s an aspirational vision she hopes to pursue further in 2025. Meetings with MPs and MPPs have convinced her the need for such a centre is paramount.

She knows it could be a long way off. Years. 

But it won’t stop her. 

“Survivors are literally dying,” she says, hoping that in the meantime, a message of hope can reach those who need to hear it. 

“No matter how dark the road ahead might seem, life is worth it—and it can be beautiful. I’ve walked through fire, endured unimaginable pain, and survived a system that was never built to protect me,” she says. “But like the phoenix, I have risen from the ashes, stronger than before.”

She is determined to reach women suffering in isolation.

“To anyone who feels lost in the darkness, know this: you are not alone. There is hope, even in the hardest moments. Keep fighting, keep believing—because you are worth it. And when you’re ready, we’ll be here, rising together.”

Email: [email protected]

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