14 GOING ON 30

Prostitute 'Can't Get The Dirt Off'

Women turn tricks on street corners and in massage parlors but many
people don't see them, or know their stories. Johns hungrily cruise
the city's West and North Ends while communities, cops and politicians
try to fight them off.

Some children pass by used condoms on their way to school. Others give
oral sex to old men to fund a crack cocaine habit.

Winnipeg Sun reporter Natalie Pona talked to the women and girls on
the street, and spoke to the policy-makers trying to clean up the
neighbourhoods. She also interviewed a married man who spent $100,000
over 20 years on sex with prostitutes.

Over three days, she tells their stories.

Alyssa's baby face is burdened by the shadows under her foggy
eyes.

"I'm 14 but I feel like 30," she says while leaning on a wooden fence
behind a corner store near the University of Winnipeg. "It's hard and
it makes you feel down all the time. No matter how much you scrub your
skin, you can't get the dirt off. It never goes away."

She won't give her real name and doesn't want her face
photographed.

Alyssa started performing sex acts for marijuana two years ago. Her
18-year-old sister has been a sex-trade worker for more than six years.

She regularly smokes crack cocaine, Alyssa says.

"Phone (a dealer) for it, walk for it, f--- for it. That's just part
of the f---ing job."

She started using crack to hang out with the drug dealers -- whom she
says are her age -- and to get away from "old, perverted" johns.

She tried treatment once but says she didn't need it.

"I'm not lost in this s---. I'm not too into it."

A boy carrying a bat passes through a yard across the street. Alyssa
and Lisa, 30, who had been working nearby, turn to watch.

The girls are anxious to talk, interrupting each other to tell their
stories.

Lisa, who has been on the street since she was 16, grew up in
Charleswood and the North End. She started working as a prostitute on
her 16th birthday when a man offered her $400 for sex. You can have a
hell of a party for that kind of money, she says.

She quit for a year and a half before she got married last Nov. 1, but
started again when her husband was put in jail for assault.

Lisa is addicted to crack.

"You only do it so you can get high, so you can get high and forget
about your problems."

CRACK PIPE THEIR PIMP

These girls don't have pimps. Their pimp is their crack pipe, they
say.

Lisa's face, gray and thin, looks older than 30. She has sad eyes,
twitchy movements and the rapid speech of someone who is high. She
also has hepatitis C.

They spend as much as $1,200 per day on crack, Lisa claims. Sometimes
they stay awake for four days.

"If somebody ever offers you crack, take a bullet to the head first.
It's a faster death. It takes your life. It takes your pride. It takes
everything with it," Lisa says.

A teenage boy rides by on a bike. Alyssa and Lisa shout at him, titter
to each other.

Then a 13-year-old girl comes bounding up a back lane from Young
Street. She asks Lisa and Alyssa whether they had heard about the man
who has been chasing prostitutes with a bat on Arlington Street. The
girl explains she had just escaped a beating.

The three, who look like they could be discussing a high school crush,
decide it was probably the same boy who had walked by carrying a bat.

The girls say they are often victims of violence. Sometimes they are
afraid, they admit.

Lisa says her throat was nearly slashed by a john. He tried to cut her
while she was performing oral sex on him. She stopped the knife in
time, she says, demonstrating how she raised her hand to protect her
throat.

Once, Alyssa says, she had agreed to do a half-and-half -- a sex act
she said begins with oral sex and ends with intercourse -- for $20.
The man haggled over the price then broke her jaw.

"I didn't even know him," she says, her inflection underscoring her
disbelief.

Lisa says she recently graduated from a program intended to help women
get off the street. Called TERF -- Transition, Education and Resources
for Females -- they offered her $15 an hour job to counsel youth
working as prostitutes. She wasn't ready. She says she needs more time
on the street to be able to reach young people, to gain
credibility.

She'll try again in January or February, Lisa says.