Butterfly In the Maze of Human Trafficking: Emotional Doc Requires a Broader Analytic Lens

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

The documentary Butterfly: In the Maze of Human Trafficking, which is available for free cross-Canada on April 24, follows the accounts of three Canadian women — Mallory, Charlie, and Raine — who were abused and sexually exploited in their youth and continue in the lifelong process of recovery. To paraphrase their accounts, which they each relate in their own way, they have each harrowed some form of hell.

Documentary subject Mallory

Director Viveka Melki’s film hops back and forth among the three women, unfolding their stories in segments, interspliced with interviews with police officers on a human trafficking task force, commentary from an Indigenous elder, clips of street workers and observations from therapists.

The approach is unabashedly emotional, augmented with a moody cello-based score, and a few too many images of butterflies as symbols of the process of healing and transformation.

Step outside the framework of cathartic testimonies, though, and Butterfly raises at least as many questions as it answers. Those questions start early in the film. Frank Pagé of the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT) Human Trafficking and Counter Exploitation Unit, describes sex trafficking as a triangle, involving “the predator, the victim and the john” though we only have hearsay accounts of the predators and johns.

The “predator” or “trafficker” is a manipulator who forms a “trauma bond” with the “victim-survivor.” He’s a school friend, a family member, someone you met at a party, a stranger who reaches out online. Or sometimes, he’s a member of a “gang.”

What cultural or sociological forces drive someone to become a “predator” remain opaque. The “john,” according to one of the women, is potentially any male you know: “The cab drivers, your dads, your uncles, your grandparents, that nice guy at the family gathering…”

The picture here is that human trafficking is a shadowy pervasive threat, hard to prosecute, and either little known or ignored by the public. Why doesn’t this sound convincing?

One objection is that, rather than being hidden, the subject of human trafficking is everywhere, often weaponized to accuse political enemies of the lowest of crimes.

Q-Anon conspiracy theorists used the charge against Hilary Clinton. Facebook photo fakes attempt to link Mark Carney to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s recently claimed that CNN wants “foreign terrorists in our country who kidnap women and children.”

Such a complex topic calls for a documentary that provides broad clarity, an empirically based perspective, grounded in sociology and criminology research. There are qualified Canadian academics who study human trafficking, including Wilfred Laurier University’s Katrin Roots (I’ve linked to the transcript of a podcast she participated in) who has studied and written critically about the social and legal meaning of “human trafficking” in the Canadian context.

Too often, reports of women and children trapped in sex slavery are designed to inflame reactions without pointing to remedial solutions. The right response to a crime that typically depends on gaslighting its victims is to be as clear-headed as possible.

Butterfly: Into the Maze of Human Trafficking. Directed by Viveka Melki. Begins streaming free here across Canada on April 24 and can also be seen in B.C. and Alberta on TELUS Optik TV Channel 8.