A B.C. man's mission of hope in Cambodia, helping human trafficking survivors

This is the third story in Hidden in Plain Sight, an in-depth series exploring human trafficking and its connection to British Columbia.

Warning: The contents may be disturbing to some readers. 

The bustling Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh is a city filled with street markets and tuk tuks.

It’s a place where the gaps between poverty and wealth stand in sharp contrast.

And it’s here that a side road brings you to a building with a very Canadian connection.

It’s the home of Ratanak International, founded by Brian McConaghy of Delta, B.C.

“This is an environment that is safe for them,” said McConaghy, a retired B.C. RCMP officer who has spent decades helping survivors in Cambodia flee modern-day slavery.

Ratanak is a refuge for traumatized women and teens who’ve just escaped a life of sex trafficking.

“They escape by jumping from moving cars, pretending to be ill so they can be taken to hospital,” he explained.

Ratanak International was founded in Cambodia in 1989.

“We had one swim through the sewers of I think it was Beijing. How bad does it have to be before you'll climb down into sewers with no expectation of even surviving?” McConaghy said.

McConaghy’s humanitarian work in Cambodia began decades ago.

While with the RCMP, he helped jail a sex predator from Vancouver in 2005.

“Donald Bakker was the first file of a Canadian coming to abuse children in Cambodia,” recalled McConaghy.

Later, police discovered another B.C. man abusing children in Cambodia. His name was Christoher Neil.

“He would post his pictures of abuse and swirl his face so he couldn’t be identified. It wasn’t hard to unswirl him and he was identified,” McConaghy explained.

Canadian teacher Christopher Neil was convicted of child sexual abuse after authorities were able to "un-swirl" his face in online images.

Though retired, McConaghy assisted Mounties in finding the building in Cambodia where Neil’s crimes were committed.

However, getting search warrants was tricky so McConaghy waited patiently, and when the building went up for sale, he bought it.

“Now that I owned the crime scene, I didn’t need warrants to examine the building. And so it was ours. So we actually processed the whole crime scene, went to court, got a conviction,” he recalled.

But McConaghy knew much more work had to be done to help victims of exploitation.

“Innocent young country girls, they’re swept up by this. Traffickers masquerading as job skills brokerage companies will get them passports, get them airline tickets, will ship the off, but in accepting the airline tickets, the visa and passports, they don’t realize they’re becoming indebted,” he said.

McConaghy said the victims are most often sent to China.

He said his organization has worked with the Cambodian government to create protocols for the return of undocumented citizens.

“We had one girl who was imprisoned in an apartment for years to be sexually abused, and she exited that apartment through an eight-storey window and she survived by ripping up curtains and making herself a rope,” he said.

Some of the women and teenagers who end up at Ratanak have been out of Cambodia for years. The organization not only gives them trauma counselling and skills training, but also gives them hope.

We met one of the hundreds of survivors helped by McConaghy’s organization in a rural area outside of Phnom Penh.

Speaking through a support working as a translator, she told CTV News that her impoverished family forced her to go to China and marry a man who she had never met.

“The husband, he used violence with her,” explained the interpreter.

The survivor said the trafficker took her passport and identification and she felt she had no way out.

“She feels a lot of anxiety and depression, and worries a lot, just thinking about (how) she has no documents, so police can catch her any time,” the interpreter explained.

After being trapped for four years, she escaped, only to be jailed until the Cambodian Embassy intervened and she was returned home, she said.

In addition to counselling, Ratanak sponsored training so she could become a tailor.

It’s a job she loves and she said it’s given her a new life.

A human trafficking survivor, left, speaks with CTV News reporter Michele Brunoro through an interpreter.

Ratanak now employees about 80 people at its centre in Phnom Penh, supported by Canadian donors.

And at the heart of it all is McConaghy.

“It’s exhausting, but after 35 years when I see lives given freedom, it just keeps me going.” He said.

And it keeps him focused on his mission of hope for those robbed of so much.

This project was made possible with funding provided by the Lieutenant Governor’s B.C. Journalism Fellowship in partnership with Government House Foundation and the Jack Webster Foundation.