Link to article:
http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2010/07/18/14750871.html
Fighting to escape the sex trade
By TAMARA CHERRY, Toronto Sun
She has been raped, beaten, robbed, tied up, manipulated, bought and sold.
A pimp told her that the world is a dark, cold place, only to find out that for her, it really is.
And now that this former escort wants out of the game that left her broken and lost, like so many others, she is realizing there are few places to turn — and, it seems, no one to trust.
“It’s not that you’re addicted to the job. You’re addicted to the money you were making. To go from making a minimum of $2,000 a week to making whatever welfare gives you is hard,” 21-year-old Jamie-Lynn (not her real name) says at the Oshawa apartment where she has been confined by fear since a life-changing encounter in May. “It’s just f---in’ hard, especially when something bad happens to you and you feel like you’re dead alone because of what you used to do, that everyone’s discriminating against you.
“There just needs to be more help.”
It was a call that vice cops across the Greater Toronto Area wait and hope for. But when Jamie-Lynn finally called York Regional Police Det.-Const. Stephen Yan to say she wanted out of the game, he had nowhere to send her.
There was no number to call for immediate services specifically geared toward those seeking help out of the sex trade. No one to understand the way the game chewed her up and spit her out. No one to get her into school, a straight job, something that can help pay her rent so she doesn’t have to move.
“If she stays up all night and sleeps through the day, you need someone who stays up all night and sleeps during the day,” says Det. Thai Truong, who heads up Yan’s team. “Someone just to guide them, almost like a parent they never had. It’s the simple things.
“You’ve got to get them back to where they were before all this,” Truong says. “They need a big brother or big sister. They need somebody for every little thing.”
It has been nearly 12 years since Jamie-Lynn moved to Canada from Australia with her mother and brother and nearly 12 years since she was first raped — by a man who lived in her north Oshawa apartment building, a man she considered a friend, she recalls.
Her second rape came a couple years later, but she can’t talk about that one.
And her third, well, we’ll get to that.
“I’ve been cutting my wrists for years,” she says. “Physical pain’s easier to deal with than emotional pain.”
Two years ago, the waitress at former Pickering strip club Palace East noticed how much money the dancers were making and, with her gymnastics background, decided she would give it a try. It wasn’t long before a pimp at the club convinced her to work for him out of Markham hotels.
He took all of her money, but paid her car bills, bought her clothes and gave her money when she needed it.
“The world is a dark, cold place and without us (him and the other women working for him), you won’t survive,” she recalls him saying.
As it goes with this game, Jamie-Lynn couldn’t leave her pimp without forking over a leaving fee.
He wanted to sell her to another pimp for $10,000, but when that pimp refused to pay that much, he granted Jamie-Lynn her freedom for $3,000.
It wasn’t long before she found another pimp — a man working out of a condominium-based escort agency who took 40% of her earnings. That working relationship ended when Jamie-Lynn saw him hit one of the other escorts, she says.
She was working for her third pimp — who took 50% of the cut — at Toronto’s Westin Prince hotel when two men robbed her at gunpoint in November 2009. She figures now that they were after her pimp because he was shot while driving in Markham the following month.
“Then I was independent (without a pimp) and boom, got raped. Woo-hoo.”
There is no shortage of sarcasm as Jamie-Lynn tries to take the edge off the six or so hours of horror she endured May 20. Like when the john raped her without a condom: “That was just f---in’ wonderful.”
She had been booked by a client in Guelph for six hours. As she walked up the steps to the split-level home, boom.
“I was knocked out for three hours, woke up tied to a bed, butt naked. He raped me twice that I know of but I don’t know how many times he raped me when I was knocked out. Yeah, good times.”
She was beaten, and thrown into the attic where her hands and wrists were scraped and burned as she wiggled free from the binding ropes, she says.
Not knowing how to lower the ladder, Jamie-Lynn jumped out of the attic, ran to a bedroom and called 911.
She was found by her attacker, beaten some more, had packing tape sealed over her mouth and was thrown down the stairs into the basement, she says.
She knew the police knocks when she heard them. Seconds later, she and her fractured skull were in the arms of an officer and her alleged attacker was in police bracelets.
As of last Friday, her 33-year-old alleged assailant remained in custody on charges of aggravated assault, sexual assault, forcible confinement and — after further investigation — possession of child pornography, according to Guelph Police.
When Jamie-Lynn tried to return to the business, she found herself sobbing in a hotel room and afraid for her life.
“I knew that me staying in the industry was just going to get worse and I was going to end up dead. I had to get out,” she says.
And so she called Det.-Const. Stephen Yan, the officer she had come to trust after someone threatened her life earlier this year. Jamie-Lynn had grown accustomed to texting Yan whenever she went to meet clients so he would know she was safe. The officer knew maintaining these lifelines could be the key to getting her out of the game.
Yan introduced Jamie-Lynn to Lynn Cysouw, peer coordinator with the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton, in June when Cysouw was in Newmarket for the preliminary hearing of a man accused of forcing a young Edmonton woman into prostitution.
Cysouw’s organization, which provides the around-the-clock services for sex workers that experts say is lacking in Ontario, is nearing the end of a three-year federal grant provided through Status of Women.
Yan and Cysouw were aware of Streetlight Support Services in Toronto, an agency whose website says is meant to “help anyone who wants to exit” the sex trade.
Jamie-Lynn made no secret of the fact that she wanted out. Over the last month, she called the agency and left at least two voicemail messages. She even mentioned the rape. But nobody returned her calls.
When she finally heard from them — after Cysouw called them on her behalf — Jamie-Lynn was told that the Bloor and Bathurst Sts. agency had been closed for two weeks for the G20 summit, she says.
Executive director Inas Garwood did not return the Toronto Sun’s calls.
The attack in Guelph felt like a dream Jamie-Lynn couldn’t wake up from, she says. “And every night now, I have the exact same dream of exactly what happened and it ends with me waking up after seeing different ways that he kills me every night.”
It is this torment that has twice driven her to attempt suicide over the last month, she says.
“It’s very sad. I feel for (Jamie-Lynn) and her situation,” says Cysouw, who has been supporting her over the phone from Edmonton. “There’s a lot of judgment and shame that comes with that lifestyle and when you’re exiting, it’s hard to find people who will understand it and not label you.”
Cysouw says she left Ontario last month saddened by how “untouched” this province is when it comes to helping women like Jamie-Lynn.
Toronto-based SexTrade101.com trauma counsellor and director Natasha Falle runs a peer support groups and mentoring program for sex workers and those trying to leave the trade.
“There’s all these organizations that help empower people to be a prostitute and refer to this as a liberating job choice, but there’s very few services to help people get out,” Falle says. “You get turned away or people don’t take you seriously or care, you assume that that’s what all the people are, because that’s what you’ve been brainwashed into in the (sex) business anyway, that these people don’t care, that you’re all alone to take care of your problems.”
That’s certainly how Jamie-Lynn feels. And she knows she’s not the only one.
When she was working as a prostitute posting ads on websites like Craigslist, she got calls from several young women looking for help. With no where else to turn, these women would call the number she posted because their pimps restricted their access to the
Internet, allowing them to only go online to post ads.
“There are so many girls who are in worse situations than me,” Jamie-Lynn says. “Like all the Chinese girls (that called me) are forced to work 24-7 — 24-7.”
She gave Yan’s number to some of the women and drove out to others to take them to a safe place herself, she says.
Jamie-Lynn has weekly appointments with Durham Family Services and a rape crisis counsellor, but says she needs someone like Cysouw who can relate to where she’s been and support her as she moves forward — someone who can help her change her name, get into school, enroll in boxing classes, volunteer at an animal shelter, find a straight job.
