Ex-stripper Timea Nagy runs a support organization for human-trafficking victims. (Andrew Hanon, QMI Agency)

EDMONTON - She thought she was coming to Canada to be a nanny.

Instead, she spent three hellish months as a sex slave, forced to dance in a Toronto strip club where most of the women were coerced into performing sex acts on the clientele.

"They used brainwashing and all kinds of methods to make me not leave them," says Timea Nagy, who is in Edmonton this week to speak at a police conference on the scourge of human trafficking, one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative criminal businesses in the world.

Nagy was a naive 20-year-old in 1998 when she answered a newspaper ad in her home town of Budapest, Hungary, looking for domestic help in Canada. No English was necessary, the ad promised.

But when she arrived here, her employers took all her I.D. and made her work as a stripper. When she refused to have sex with customers, her captors raped her.

Nagy was kept under lock and key with several other Hungarian girls, threatened and fed lies about the dangers of living in Canada.

"They painted a completely different picture," Nagy says. "If you (talk) to the Indian cab drivers, they're going to rape you. If you go to the Canadian police, they'll rape you. If you walk the streets at 2 a.m. the black people will take you. It worked on me for a while."

Overwhelmed with shame, emotionally and physically brutalized and unable to communicate with any outsiders, Nagy was at her jailers' mercy.

"I felt like I was the criminal," she says. "I thought I wasn't the good girl I used to be. I was very confused. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't understand what was happening to me."

Eventually, she managed to escape. Now Nagy runs Walk With Me, an organization devoted to drawing more attention to human trafficking in North America.

She's speaking this week at a conference put on by the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team, which has drawn cops from across Canada to the River Cree resort in Enoch.

Edmonton police Supt. Danielle Campbell called human trafficking "a crime that has largely flown under the radar in Canada," even though it makes more money than arms dealing for global organized crime and is second only to the drug trade.

Official numbers say that about 800 people, mostly women, are brought to Canada every year and forced into virtual slavery, working in the sex trade, sweat shops and elsewhere, but Campbell suspects the real numbers are much higher.

Since human trafficking became a specific crime in 2005, there have only been a handful of charges laid. The first in Western Canada was in Edmonton last September, when cops charged three owners of a west-end massage parlour. They're accused of keeping three foreign women in the parlour and forcing them provide sex around the clock.

Staff Sgt. John Fiorilli, head of the Edmonton police vice squad, says that while police haven't charged anyone since then with human trafficking, they've helped at least six more victims escape.

Proving that someone is being trafficked is extremely difficult if the victim is too scared or confused to testify against the trafficker, he explained.

Ultimately, he said, "what's more important is looking after that victim. Our key goal here is the victim, to improve their status, their place in life. If in the end, we don't end up going to court, we just look at the rescues."

He added that in Edmonton there are several more investigations into trafficking, but couldn't go into detail. Even if that charge isn't laid, there are others that can be, such as living off the avails of prostitution.

More than a decade after her horrific odyssey, Nagy is still paying the price.

It's affected her life, she says, "in every possible way you can think of. It's been 13 years. I never meant to do this or be the face of human trafficking. This the only way people know me now. This is all I talk about."

andrew.hanon@sunmedia.ca