Career Options
Prostitution
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Today, the average entry age into prostitution is 14, so children under the age of consent at 16 tend to be invisible, working in massage parlours or escort services.
"It's an underground economy, but it's busy. If you look for it you can find it," says Det. Reuben Stroble of the Metro Police Child Exploitation/Child Prostitution Unit. "We treat them as victims of violence because more than 95% are running from familial sexual abuse. They're runaways or throwaways, but they're not hookers. They're children being commercially raped and our society is letting it happen."
Except at Streetlight, where girls over 16 are referred. Many are already hooked into "the life" and in emotionally corrosive co-dependent relationships with predatory pimps who control them through physical and psychological battery.
After 12 years in the sex trade, seven of them married to her pimp and working on the street, "where you can make more money by doing less," Falle is highly effective helping prostitutes understand the dynamics of the pimp-prostitute relationship.
"There's no difference between a prostitute and pimp relationship and any other domestic relationship," she says. "They have houses in the suburbs and kids they send to private schools. But between the domestic politics of intimate violence and the street politics of abuse from other 'johns,' life is far more threatening and risky for a prostitute/wife."
Falle's story is tragically typical. She clung to the hope her husband would change, that if she worked hard and made lots of money, he wouldn't get another girl. But during the last two years of her marriage, between his routine beatings and threats from other prostitutes, she resorted to an occasional $30 snort of cocaine which quickly became a $500-a-night crack habit "to numb the pain." When she became so delusional and didn't recognize her mother, she knew she had to get out.
Falle's year-long recovery was meteoric. Following a month in drug treatment and 90 days in the West End Detention Centre, she completed high school in seven months. In 2001, she worked at Streetlight while finishing a George Brown College "Wife Assault and Child Advocacy" diploma, and since then she's re-developed the Choices program.
Needed support
"I needed so much support to exit sex work permanently, from my mother, at school and now here," says Falle. "When I first came to Streetlight, I had to go to Beverley because I didn't even know how to vote or do taxes. Now I can go to her about anything and not feel ashamed or embarrassed. She understands I'm learning how main stream society works."
Some hard core truths about prostitution
An estimated 10,000 prostitutes work in the Greater Toronto Area, with more than 4,000 in the escort trade, according to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.
Contact Streetlight at 416-534-0680 and Streetlightsupportservices.com.
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