Somebody's Daughter Read Free

before turning nineteen. That same study showed that most of the teens entering the prostitution trade had run away from home at least once in the past and that most had done so at a very young age. Being a young teenage runaway is just the first step toward becoming a prostitute. Entering The Game is usually a choice made for the girls by pimps with a keen eye for a profitable mark. Pimps chose young girls for two reasons: they are more profitable because they look fresh and attractive on the street, and they are easier to manipulate.
    In many ways, Annie Mae Wilson fit the profile of a girl destined to become a prostitute. She ran away from home at a young age. She quit school because it made her feel inferior to the smarter kids. By age fourteen she found a pimp who convinced her she could be the smart one, that she already had everything she needed to be a success. Annie Mae followed the young man into the prostitution game and never looked back.
    Annie Mae could have left the street without giving up her life. Only months before the teenage prostitute was killed, a special police task force had been established in the Halifax area, called into service when juvenile prostitution in Halifax suddenly became a high-profile social problem. But the public outcry that finally spurred Nova Scotia’s law-enforcement system to take effective action against The Game came too late for Annie Mae Wilson. Her years in The Game had fostered a strong hatred and mistrust of police. Annie Mae knew it was the prostitutes, rather than their pimps, who were the targets of the criminal justice system. By 1992, Canadian police were filing ten thousand prostitution related charges every year. That was a dramatic increase from pre-1985 figures of about two thousand per year. The new figures did not represent a major influx of prostitutes in Canada’s streets or a major crack down by police. It had its source in the inception of Bill C-49, an amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada that prohibited solicitation but failed to make a dent in The Game. The new law made it tougher for girls to work the streets; it did not deter the men who placed them there.
    There are no accurate figures to indicate how many pimps are working in Canada. Calculating that number is made impossible by another rule the pimps enforce. When a prostitute is arrested she almost always tells the police she is working alone, and it is almost always a lie. Annie Mae Wilson was punished for not paying Bruno Cummings a leaving fee, a violation of the rules she was brave or foolish enough to risk. Annie Mae would never have risked telling a police officer she was working for a pimp.
    Pimps in Canada take in millions of dollars yearly. They use the money to fuel their love of high living: fancy cars, fine clothes, expensive jewellery, while they shunt their young workers from city to city, stroll to stroll, degradation to degradation to maintain their preferred standard of living.
    It was in the hands of the Scotians, the name given by police to the Metro Halifax-based pimping ring, that Annie Mae Wilson became a pawn in The Game. It was by the hand of one of its players, and only a peripheral one, that her involvement in it reached its tragic conclusion. Unlike the growing list of young prostitutes in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver, and other cities, Annie Mae had rebuffed police efforts to take a new tack against the appalling trade in young people. That new approach had police targeting the pimping rings instead of their youthful victims.
    Anti-pimping task forces had been fighting the battle against juvenile prostitution since the mid-1980s in Toronto and 1988 in Vancouver. They were making steady gains on the city street as officers slowly persuaded more and more young prostitutes to testify against their pimps. The key to their growing success was a dramatic change of attitude, deriving from a new police recognition that they were in a war to save young lives as much as