Canadian country artist Paul Brandt doing his part to prevent sex trafficking
· Toronto Sun
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When Canadian musician Paul Brandt decided he wanted to use his celebrity status for a worthwhile cause, he knew his personal trademark was a good place to begin.
“The (black) cowboy hat gets me in a lot of doors,” Brandt told the Toronto Sun on Thursday afternoon in Brampton.
Brandt is the founder of the “#NotInMyCity” campaign, a charitable organization that prevents and disrupts sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. With the help of students and faculty at Mount Royal University in Calgary, the charity was founded in 2017.
The 54-year-old was in Brampton to lend his support and time as the Peel Police Foundation donated $150,000 to strengthen support for trafficking victims and survivors across the region. Though he had no way of knowing it at the time, a documentary he watched years ago with his wife Liz, titled Children for Sale, led the Alberta resident in this direction.
‘Shocked at what we saw’
“We were just shocked at what we saw,” Brandt said of the documentary. “There is a demand for purchasing children for sex and this documentary kind of blew the roof off that this was such a problem.”
A couple of weeks after watching the documentary, Brandt travelled to Cambodia to see first-hand what he witnessed on T.V.
During his time in the South Asian nation, he said he met several people who were intervening on behalf of exploited children. He also met some of the children who had been exploited.
He didn’t go into many details of what he witnessed in person, but it had an emotional impact on him and his wife.
“My wife suffered PTSD responses from what we saw there,” he said. “And so that was the initial, sort of, assault that happened in our lives related to human trafficking.”
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His return trip to Cambodia four years later finally pushed him in the right direction, eventually leading him toward the idea of forming the charity.
“I won’t go into all the details, but it was one of the darkest places that I’ve been connected to human trafficking and I met a five-year-old who was being trafficked six to eight times a night,” he said.
Brandt said traffickers are making over $280,000 per year off of each victim in Canada.
“I thought it was something that happened somewhere else, but I started to learn that this is one of the fastest growing crimes in Canada .”