Today's Sun...
http://www.torontosun.com/Columnists/williamson.html
October 26, 2003
Society's child
Whatever happened to Ontario's law to take teen hookers off the streets?
By LINDA WILLIAMSON -- Toronto Sun
She made news when she was just 11, was the subject of feature articles at 15 - and a long obituary when she died. At only 19.
She was famous, or perhaps infamous, but too anonymous for the public to really care.
We called her "Kimberly," but as my Sun colleague Michele Mandel revealed in an in-depth portrait a week ago, her real name was Amanda Lynn Aldridge. She was a prostitute - a child prostitute who grew into a garden-variety hooker - notorious (because she was once known as Toronto's youngest streetwalker), but ultimately, in death, faceless.
Mandel detailed the grim specifics of Kimberly/Amanda's life, but there was a chilling universality to it, too - the all-too-common story of the seedy world of prostitution.
Fleeing the dysfunctional family, falling into the clutches of pimps, then trapped by drug addiction. As Michele recounted, this lost innocent told loved ones she expected to die before she turned 20, and she was right.
Kimberly/Amanda's death by a drug overdose was an almost mundane end to a shocking life - a quickly forgotten statistic. But that in itself points to a sickness in our society, and a failure of all the systems we trust to protect children.
Her case was well-known, but she was - is - far from alone.
Study after study has documented hundreds of child prostitutes on Canadian city streets, with an average age of 14 (which just happens to be this country's age of sexual consent, and which our powers that be seem to have no interest in changing). That average suggests, of course, that there are plenty of so-called "teen hookers" out there who are younger - not yet "teens" at all.
And the fact that they're out there by the hundreds - on our streets, not in some faraway, lawless country - means there's a strong demand for their "services." Lots of pedophiles, perverts, criminals, paying children to abuse them. Yet what are we doing about it?
In Kimberly/Amanda's case, police publicly lamented that their efforts to get her off the street were useless, thanks in large part to laws that let children as young as 16 do just about anything they want no matter what harm it does them.
She openly taunted them, saying once she was 16 they couldn't touch her. Oh, they could arrest her once in a while, but within days she'd be back out there, turning tricks and feeding her drug habit.
(Which, of course, speaks volumes about what a joke our laws on pimping, "escort serivces" and drug trafficking are.)
What struck me as sadder still, though, was the knowledge that there was a law that might have helped Kimberly/Amanda, and hundreds like her, if only our politicians had cared enough to act on it sooner.
Right now, Alberta is the only province in Canada where police actually take teen hookers off the street for their own protection, and put them in a "safe house" for 30 days - enough time to break the grip of the pimps, the drugs and the lure of the street. (Confining wayward kids to their rooms - what a concept!)
Ontario, too, had good intentions in this regard. Former Tory premier Mike Harris endorsed the idea of such a law in 1999. One was drafted (arising out of a private member's bill by a Liberal, MPP Rick Bartolucci) and agreed to in 2000, but it wasn't passed into law until 2002. Yet, shamefully, to this day, it has never been proclaimed; i.e., it's not in effect.
Why not? Well, "safe houses" plus the needed additional law enforcement would cost money - and we all know how tight that is at the provincial level (although, as we learned last week, the feds are awash in surplus cash again).
Whatever the excuses, they come too late for Kimberly/ Amanda. The question now must be, will Ontario's new Liberal government - which has launched its own "children's ministry," whatever that is - finally act on this?
Better yet, will they push their federal cousins - whose legacy to children is pretty paltry so far - to make it a national priority? (After all, aren't street kids across Canada entitled to the same protection they've had in Alberta for three years now?)
Or will they, like millions of Canadians, continue to turn a blind eye to the hundreds of lost little girls (and boys) in the deadly so-called sex trade?
