PARENTS WONDER WHAT WENT WRONG

WHEN children disappear into an evil world of drugs and pimps, they
aren't always fleeing abusive parents or indifferent upbringings.
Sometimes, they simply take a wrong turn and are lost.

Sally Sharpe and Jane Cornwell watched helplessly as their daughters
inexorably moved from innocent children to sexually abused young teens.

When Cindy Sharpe was 15, she stole her mother's engagement ring to
pay for crack.

By then, she'd built up a debt to men who repeatedly demanded sex in
exchange for drugs. She lost her virginity, her self-esteem and a
couple of years in a smoky morass.

Her mother, a self-defined tough cookie, knew things were bad. Sally
Sharpe, herself a street survivor, heard rumours her middle child was
running with the wrong crowd. By the time she realized her daughter
was having sex with strangers in motel rooms, drugged and only caring
about her next high, the girl was nearly lost.

"She just kept staying out. Her attitude changed. Her sleeping habits
changed," says Sharpe, playing with her coffee cup in a north-end
restaurant. "I knew there were problems but I didn't know what she was
doing."

Cindy, a beautiful girl with an easy smile, says her descent was a
rapid one. She got drunk and was introduced to crack without knowing
what she was smoking. The incredible high, she says, got her hooked.
Her suppliers, adult men she didn't know, told her what she had to do
to get more drugs.

"There were seven guys and me and my friend. When they were sleeping
with me, I didn't feel nothing," says the teenager. "I thought 'So
this is what it's like.' They gave us four rocks. That would last us
20 minutes to an hour."

Her daughter's actions remained a mystery, says her
mother.

"She didn't call. I didn't know where she was. In a way, I punished
myself. I'd go out searching and I'd hear stories but she wouldn't
come home."

Cindy, whose weight plummeted from 157 pounds to 110, says she kept
things hidden from her mom until a week-long bender landed her in hospital.

"Me and my friend smoked in a motel with these guys for two days," she
says. "How am I gonna get more? That's all I can think about. I didn't
eat. I didn't sleep. Some guys came and we were there for four more
days. I didn't eat. I didn't go to the bathroom. I had this massive
pain in my stomach. Oh my God, it hurt so much."

The girl passed out, woke up again and begged her girlfriend to call a
cab to take her home. She couldn't walk to the cab on her own. When
her mother saw her, they raced to hospital where Cindy was diagnosed
with a massive bladder infection. The battle to save the teenager
began in earnest. It wasn't an easy victory.

Cindy was picked up by police, found in hotel rooms drugged and
incoherent. Police told Sharpe they had photos of her daughter
engaging in sex acts; the despairing mother had Cindy sent to a
psychiatric ward for a brief stay. Theirs is not an easy family and
the battles grew more pitched.

"I threw her down the stairs," says Sharpe. "I wouldn't put up with
her no more. I got wild. She hit my other daughter with the telephone.
I threw her out. I just told her she couldn't live with me."

Sharpe's husband wasn't much help, she says.

"Me and him talked about it," she says, "but a father don't want to
hear about it. I just had to be strong."

Mother and daughter reached an uneasy peace when Sally Sharpe told her
daughter about her own experiences with drugs and prostitution.

"I needed to tell her she wasn't alone," says Sally. "I been there. I
done that. My family accepted what I was doing. They didn't toss me
out."

Jane Cornwell's story began in a different place but she ended up
searching the same filthy streets for her two children. Cornwell's
kids were 12 and 14 the day they left home. They went to school one
day and simply never came back. She spent seven years fighting for
their souls, trying to rescue her babies from a life of drugs and
prostitution.

"They were kids who had lessons, who had schooling, who had love," she
says today, sitting in her tidy St. Vital home. "No one wants to
believe it could be their children. I never suspected it could be mine."

Her kids were lonely, she now believes, because they were members of a
minority. Their suburb didn't welcome them, they were isolated at
school and they were vulnerable. It took one kid to sell them drugs
and another to persuade them the streets were preferable to home. They
were lost.

"Parents have to understand that this problem isn't limited to the
inner city," she says.

"This is everybody's problem. I think we have to make people care. We
have to make it real. We have to take away that over-made-up
short-skirted mask and let them know these are kids who believe in
Santa Claus. These are our kids."

Trying to cope when your children flee is a nightmare, Cornwell
says.

"You're hopeless, you're helpless, you're guilt-ridden and you're
blamed," she says. "You get everything in one package. You're raging:
'My baby is gone! Dammit, she knows better!' You just don't know what
to do. There's the shame that your kid is doing something socially
unacceptable. You sure didn't teach them this at home.

"I didn't know the streets. I learned them. You live in a middle-class
area, you don't know what is going on. There is an enormous amount to
learn. First, there's sort of enormous grief that comes from watching
that waste of human potential. You can lose them in 24 hours. They can
go to a party, meet the wrong people and they're gone.

"I learned which back alleys to check, which hideouts there are, how
to check a dumpster to see if a body is inside."

Cornwell swore that if she got her kids back, she'd help other parents
battle the streets. In 1991, she helped form a support group for
families of street-involved youth, now funded through New Directions.
"Your friends, your relatives are uncomfortable around your kids when
they do come back," she says. "Even their friends, they've lost all
commonalties with their friends. Parents need to know it can happen to
them. They need to know they can't judge the neighbour's kid when this
happens. Even more, they need to offer their support and concern. They
don't need a thousand suggestions on how to fix the kid.

"The parent group allows for strategies. They help you cope. The group
lets you say things you can't say in public. They let you laugh at
awful things because you need to let it out. They allow you to be sad,
to handle things like Christmas when your child comes home and you
know he's going to leave again."

Cornwell says she believes parents need support and johns need heavier
punishments.

"Sure the gangs are running the girls but the husbands, brothers and
uncles are the johns," she says. "The ones who are repeat offenders, I
say we go for blood. I think we take them to morgues and show them
dead hookers. I think we take their family photo albums and say 'Would
you do it with this niece, this daughter, this nephew?' "

While her story eventually ended with her children coming home,
Cornwell says sometimes parents have to give up the fight.

"Sometimes you have to cut the reins, four or five years into it. You
realize if I don't stop this I'm going to be in a psych unit. If I
don't stop this, I'm going to kill a john or a pimp. If I keep doing
this, I'm going to neglect my other children."

Cornwell says society has to fight harder for its lost
children.

"These kids have value and if we lose them we lose a part of
ourselves."