 Donald Bakker, a B.C. father, was the first Canadian convicted under the child sex-tourism law.  Sgt. Ron Bieg, a 20-year veteran with the Vancouver Police, led a team of more than 50 investigators in the case against Bakker.  Brian McConaghy, a former RCMP firearms specialist, runs the Ratanak Foundation, a charity that helps child victims of sexual exploitation. Vancouver Police enlisted his expertise in finding key identifiers in the video that narrowed down the location of the Asian brothels.  The child sex-tourism law has been in the Canadian Criminal Code since 1997 but only three people have ever been convicted under it. |
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View larger imageUpdated Sat. Mar. 7 2009
W-FIVE Staff
Canadians travelling abroad to have sex with children is an abhorrent and shocking offence, punishable under Canada's Criminal Code. But are some Canadians getting away with this crime? Canada's so-called child sex-tourism law is supposed to punish Canadians who travel overseas to have sex with children. It's a law that has been on the books since 1997, but in more than a decade only three Canadians have been convicted.
W-FIVE takes an in-depth look at the unprecedented international investigation and arrest of Donald Bakker - Canada's first conviction under the law, and asks why Canadian authorities aren't doing more to catch its pedophiles overseas.
It's Dec. 2, 2003 in Vancouver's CRAB Park, a little patch of green tucked between the harbour and nearby railway tracks. Screams are heard from the bushes. A city worker taking a lunch break nearby calls 911. Vancouver Police are quickly dispatched to the scene.
Police find a hysterical woman running from the shrubs and a middle-aged man carrying a blue bag. That man is Donald Bakker, a 40-year-old husband and father.
Bakker is arrested and brought in for questioning. In the bag, police find a disturbing videotape of Bakker sexually assaulting the woman in the park and torturing prostituted women he had picked up on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
With Donald Bakker in custody, police executed a search warrant of the home Bakker shared with his wife and infant son. The 11-hour search unearthed a cache of hardcore pornography. A search of his car revealed more videotapes showing Bakker torturing adult women.
Even more disturbing was video of Bakker sexually assaulting young Asian girls.
Sgt. Ron Bieg, a 20-year veteran with the Vancouver Police, couldn't believe his eyes when he reviewed the seized evidence.
"First of all you're just awestruck. You're just going, 'this can't be happening'," Bieg told W-FIVE's Victor Malarek.
Bieg led a team of more than 50 investigators to find the women in the videos. But the more daunting task was to locate seven Asian girls -- some as young as seven years of age -- which required dozens of officers and international help.
According to Bieg and Sgt. Benedikte Wilkinson, the biggest help came from Brian McConaghy. He's a former RCMP firearms specialist who now runs the Ratanak Foundation, a Cambodian-based charity that helps rehabilitate child victims of sexual exploitation.
Bieg sent the Bakker tapes to McConaghy, who knows Cambodia, its brothels, and has witnessed first-hand the trauma experienced by young girls sold to foreign pedophiles for sex.
It was McConaghy's deft eye that helped narrow down the location of the brothels where the tape was shot and where Bakker had paid the young girls for oral sex.
"There were the children who were speaking a combination of Vietnamese and Khmer," said McConaghy, recalling how he was able to find the brothel. "Khmer's the Cambodian language. So that's a big clue right there. Some of the kids had a thing called a Kroma which is a checkered scarf that's classically Cambodian."
On the tape, McConaghy also identified a Cambodian calendar from 2003 on the wall. It was another important clue for Vancouver Police, giving them a probable date for Bakker's sex-tourist visit to Cambodia.
The next step for Bieg and Wilkinson was to travel to Cambodia -- to the squalor and filth of the brothels -- in order to bring home the evidence that was needed to secure Bakker's conviction.
"It's squalor. The streets were dirty. There's garbage everywhere. There's sewage everywhere, you know, open sewage," Wilkinson told W-FIVE.
Inside one brothel they found clear evidence that this was where Bakker had sex with children. Smudges on the wall matched the video. So did photographs. Combined with the other evidence it was enough to secure Bakker's conviction under Canada's child sex-tourism law. Bakker eventually pleaded guilty to those crimes, and the brutal sexual assaults of some Vancouver prostitutes, Bakker is now serving a 10-year sentence.
Few successes
The world-wide investigation of Donald Bakker and his conviction was not case-closed. It unfurled a debate about why Canada isn't doing more to capture and arrest Canadians who have sex with minors overseas.
Bakker is one of only three Canadians to be convicted under the 12-year-old child sex tourism law, prompting some legal experts to suggest Canadian law enforcement isn't doing enough to investigate and bring pedophiles to justice.
Benjamin Perrin, who teaches law at the University of British Columbia, argues that the low number of convictions doesn't reflect the true number of Canadians seeking sex with children overseas.
"We know for a fact that Canadians are among this group of international sex offenders," said Perrin in an interview.
He obtained records through Access to Information requests that show between 1993 and 2008, despite few convictions at home, at least 156 Canadians faced local charges in foreign jurisdictions for offences related to child sex abuse and exploitation.
"Canada passed a child sex tourism law in 1997, saying basically you abuse children abroad, we're going after you," "What Canada did is pass the law and basically forgot about it," said Perrin.
Instead, as Perrin told W-FIVE, Canada seems to rely on other countries to investigate and arrest Canadian pedophiles offending overseas - in countries such as Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico.
"We have a series of recent cases where the American authorities have actually been catching Canadian offenders in their own dragnets and having to charge them under U.S. law, trying to extradite them to U.S. courts for crimes these Canadians committed in developing countries for abusing children."
Leave it to Americans
On Dec. 15, 2008, American investigators arranged for the arrest of Canadian John Wrenshall, following an investigation in Thailand. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) led the investigation into Wrenshall's activities. The Canadian had moved to Thailand after completing a prison sentence in Alberta for indecently assaulting eight young choir boys.
The 62-year-old English teacher was arrested, in London, England, on child sex tourism related charges, as he was trying to make his way his way back to Canada. He is currently awaiting extradition to the U.S.
To date, Canadian authorities have not initiated any charges against Wrenshall for his alleged offences in Thailand.
"I cannot think of any good reason why Canada should not have laid these charges and why we're foisting the investigative burden onto the U.S. taxpayers," said Perrin.
"Why are U.S. taxpayers paying to prosecute a Canadian sex offender for what he allegedly did abroad? He's our problem to deal with. If there's evidence against him, we should be prosecuting him."
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