This girl could be the girl next door. This girl could be your daughter. This girl could be your granddaughter, could be your niece. It doesn't matter if you are in the upper echelon of society or if you are in those communities that are marginalized because it could affect you.

No one knew that I was being exploited. Nobody knew that, unless they were the ones exploiting me and unless I was in that environment with people.

So, I was being trafficked and had absolutely no idea I was being trafficked. I didn't know that that's what was happening because my education around what human trafficking looked like was the movie 'Taken.'

The myth is that these girls, they're brought over from other countries in containers and then they're spread throughout Canada. That's so far from the truth. That's a huge myth.

For years, sex trafficking was believed to only happen in developing countries. That is not the reality in Canada. According to Public Safety Canada, domestic cases make up 90 percent of all reported sex trafficking incidents in the country. Take Ontario, for example. Two-thirds of all cases reported to police are from Ontario and the GTA is a major hotspot. Karly Church is one survivor of domestic sex trafficking that happened right here in Toronto.

There was a period of time in grade school where I was bullied and would never go to school. So, I started to act out and no one really asked me what was going on. Like, there was things that I just didn't know how to say and I didn't know how to ask for help and I think people kind of looked over that and didn't realize that my behaviors and the things I was doing was because I was hurting. Then as a young teenager, I experienced sexual violence and I didn't tell anybody. So instead of asking for help or reaching out to anybody, I actually decided, well I didn't decide, I found drugs. So it kind of became my coping mechanism, I guess.

Karly tried cocaine when she was 14 and by the age of 23, Karly was fully dependent on opioids. One night, Karly was kicked out of a downtown Toronto detox centre. Her choices after that led her to meet two men, who would later become her traffickers.

I actually got kicked out of detox after three days of being there, me and another girl. It was just her and I, all we had each was like, a backpack and like 20 bucks. So, she said to me, she said "I know this place that we can go to, we'll probably be able to get drugs there," so we jumped on the go train and we went there.

So, when we got there, the whole cycle that I was so familiar with and so used to and comfortable doing is what I continued to do. So, drug dealers came and went, I exchanged sex for my drug of choice. Then all of a sudden, these two guys walked in and it was different. Immediately, I felt different. I felt like they noticed me immediately. They looked at every single one of my vulnerabilities and I wore my vulnerabilities on the outside. You could really see them from a mile away. When they met me, I was in a new city. I was homeless. I had no family or social supports and I had a serious drug addiction. So really, I was a easy target. Half the work was really done for them. But the way that they brought me through the stages of commercial exploitation is identical to how every trafficker does that. They started to talk to me and they started to ask me like, what was I doing there, like I didn't belong there, I was different. So instantly, it made me feel special. One, they noticed me immediately and two, they were telling me that like, I was too beautiful to be there or I don't belong there. So I felt really good, so I started to engage in conversation with them and then they started to ask me a million questions. It didn't feel though like I was being interviewed or I was being interrogated, I actually felt incredibly, incredibly good. I felt so special, you know. For once, somebody stopped and noticed I was struggling and asked me about it. For once, somebody stopped and took time out of their life to ask me about mine. It had been a long time since somebody had really stopped and noticed, you know, and wanted to get to know me.

Sex trafficking happens in a series of steps. Often, vulnerable girls are lured in by pimps, masquerading as boyfriends or rich bachelors. They're told lies, sold a dream of expensive cars and condos and then, they find themselves trapped. Isolated, with only their pimps to rely on.

So, when he brought up the idea of working in the sex trade, he did so in a very direct way. He pretty much said to me "All this stuff I've done for you, the clothes I bought you, the drugs I've given you, the hotel you've been staying in, the food I bought you, it all cost money. It wasn't free. This is how much money you owe me and this is how you're going to pay me back."

Karly's experience is similar to many trafficked girls across Canada. However, there's another perspective that's missing. The Native Women's Association of Canada estimates that 50 percent of all trafficked victims in the country are Indigenous and yet First Nations, Metis and Inuit people make up only five percent of the Canadian population.

Beatrice Wallace is a sex trafficking survivor from Muskegon First Nations in Saskatchewan. She was adopted when she was four by a white, middle-class family in Regina. She experienced abuse in that community and at the age of 14, Beatrice was lured by pimps into the sex trade.

I just turned 14 at this time and I had never smoked a cigarette or you know, had a boyfriend, kissed a boy, drank alcohol, I never did anything like that. Like, I was extremely vulnerable and extremely innocent. So, this girl took me into this home and as soon as I walked in it was like, dark, dirty and smoky and I had never been in an environment like that. There's a bunch of adults using intravenous needles at the table and one of the ladies held up a needle and she said "Do you know what this is?" and I said "No" and she said "This will take all your worries away" and within a half an hour, that needle was in my arm. That night, I was sexually assaulted by two men and that was the beginning of my grooming and my loss of my innocence.

The average age for a girl to enter sex trafficking in Canada is 13. These young girls are typically forced to do tricks or perform sexual acts in hotel rooms, in condominiums, even neighborhood houses. One girl can be abused by 10 or even 20 patrons per night. Beatrice spent 16 years in a cycle of trying to escape sex trafficking, only to be dragged in time and time again.

To me, it was okay to put myself on the streets because it was like "You've done, this you're garbage anyways" kind of thing. I couldn't escape the realities of my life that at 14 years old, you know, men were paying sex for me and it was my fault. No one ever thought it was a pimp's fault at that time, it was it was all my fault.

Sex trafficking is more than just a system of abuse in this country, it's also a lucrative one. Nunzio Tramontozzi spent six years in charge of the Toronto Police Human Trafficking Enforcement Team. He estimates that pimps can make $280,000 per year off of one girl. The reality is that some pimps can have up to twenty girls under their control, in what they call a 'stable.' That means one pimp can make over $4 million dollars per year, through sex trafficking.

It's all about money and power. That's what this is all about, nothing else. It's about them having the money and getting the money and with that money, they get the power. It's a massive problem here. I can tell you that in every hotel in this city, there's a human trafficking victim in it right now, no doubt about it in my mind.

In Toronto, Tramontozzi said that he witnessed the horrific and inhumane ways pimps can treat their trafficked girls. One incident haunts him to this day.

It was a case where a pimp had forced a girl into the sex trade and they're in his in his condo, here in downtown Toronto. They had an argument because she wanted to get out of the sex trade, she didn't want to do it any longer and he beat her up pretty bad. She fought back and what he did was he broke a beer bottle and cut her Achilles tendon. He actually wrapped a towel around it and then he picked her up and he walked her down the back stairs of the condo and threw her beside a dumpster and threatened to kill her if she had called the police.

Beatrice made the brave move to ask the police for help one night, when her pimp nearly killed her.

I was trying to make it like "This is okay, he's not hurting me," even though he beat me up. You know, the man that you know sexually brutalized me all night long and beat the crap out of me and choked to me as he you know told me to say the Lord's Prayer because I was going to die. It wasn't until I escaped him, you know, and it is because of God that the police station just happened to be across the street. Going in there and falling to the ground, you know, I was beating up so bad my face wasn't recognizable, it wasn't until then when I realized "I'm gonna die in this in this lifestyle."

At the age of 30, Beatrice tried to end her life.

I was like "I'm done, I can't live this life anymore. I don't care if I go to hell," and I injected myself with two times the drugs I'd ever do. Then I just felt my eyes rolling back and I could see my life flash before my eyes and I could see my kids and I could see my life and I could see everything that happened and I'm just like "No, I'm not gonna die a statistic." My neighbours happened to be there and I just remember waking up at their table and and my neighbour told me, she said "Either choose drugs or you choose your kids but you can't have them both," and when she told me that it was like, that was the first time I ever experienced someone actually caring for me.

After escaping the sex trade, Beatrice turned her life around.

Three months after that I put myself through detox, which is extremely hard because I was on really heavy drugs. I ended up getting my kids back within three months and earlier I had somehow got my GED, even though I only finished grade eight and I put myself in university.

As Beatrice started her journey to recovery, she crossed paths with Glendyne Gerrard. Glendyne is the founder and executive director of Defend Dignity, an organization that works to end human trafficking and raises awareness around it.

The trauma that comes along with all that, the pain that comes along with that, we need to know about that as Canadians. We need to feel the same kind of pain they do because I don't think anything's going to change until we we figure that out. So she's been just so good for all of us to be confronted on a regular basis with some of the challenges that are ongoing, that she still faces, so it's just a constant reminder when she rubs shoulders with all of us about "Okay, here are the core issues of what's really going on."

Now, Glendyne and Beatrice both work on the leadership team of Defend Dignity.

There's organizations, like Defend Dignity, there's organizations in most places that are starting to open up. But the reason why I do this is because I don't want anyone to be that 14-year-old girl that had nobody. If I had a place to go when I was 14 years old, someone to say "Hey, come stay here" without wanting sexual services for me, someone to say "Hey everything's going to be okay" you know, maybe I wouldn't have gone through so many years of my life like that.

For Karly, her form of help came in a way she never expected. She heard a knock on her hotel room door one day. Instead of the usual John who made the appointment, she was greeted by an undercover cop.

He booked a fake appointment with me. I guess him and his team had looked online at the ads. My ad had a lot of red flags that I was being trafficked, so they booked an appointment. He showed up at my hotel room and from the moment he showed up at that hotel room, he did everything right. So he came in and he sat down on the other bed and he just talked to me. He talked to me like I was a human being. He talked to me like he would his sister or his daughter. He sat there for a whole hour and he talked to me. They helped me apply for a drug treatment centre. They introduced me to loving, supportive, caring people who boosted my self-esteem and boosted my self-worth. They were patient, they were consistent, they were compassionate, they were empathetic, they provided me with wraparound services.

Karly now travels to schools, speaking to youth, teachers and other adults who work with young people, to educate them about human trafficking in Ontario.

So if I can tell my story and I can bring awareness to this and I can help this from not happening to one girl, then what I went through was not for nothing. So I will continue to tell my story for that reason. If we empower people, they're not going to be trafficked. Empowered youth are not trafficked. They're able to identify those red flags. They're able to speak up, they're able to ask for help, they're able to identify red flags, they're able to identify when somebody's not treating them in a way that is appropriate.

As we've seen through Karly and Beatrice's stories, human trafficking is a local issue. It's happening right now, right here in busy cities and small towns. It's happening under our noses, in front of our eyes.

For the Ryerson documentary unit, I'm Sarah Chew.