Somebody's Daughter Read Free Page A

to jail those bent on their destruction. Each one of these youngsters was somebody’s daughter, and, often starved for nurturing family relationships, a young prostitute frequently turned to a task-force officer as a surrogate parent once she saw that the police were no longer intent on punishing her, but on rescuing her by putting her pimp out of commission.
    But if juvenile prostitution preys on girls who fall through the cracks, who come from broken homes, or who are easily influenced for other reasons, it is also a predator that gives up its victims with great reluctance. Some cling to the heartbreaking belief in their pimps as “family.” The vicious beatings those pimps often deliver are almost always accompanied by the reminder that the pimp/relative is only punishing a girl for her own good, however grossly inappropriate the lesson. Others turned their backs on the offer of help from the new police task forces in the belief that they can play The Game on their own terms, and that their lives will ultimately be better than their upbringing. That was Annie Mae Wilson’s belief until Bruno Cummings showed her The Game is no place for an independent-mined working girl.
    For police in Halifax, the death of a teenage prostitute could not have come at a worse time. Public outrage over juvenile prostitution was at an all-time high late in 1992, fuelled by media accounts of circumstances leading to the arrests of key members of the Scotians that summer. Graphic reports on the pimps’ abuse of several Nova Scotia teenagers who had been located and returned home during a police raid in Toronto led to the highly publicized establishment of the joint-force anti-prostitution task force. It was set up in Dartmouth less than two months after the raid. The unit’s office was only a few minutes by car from the apartment building where Bruno had killed Annie Mae, and it didn’t take long for word to reach that police unit. The news hit the task force hard; its investigators, from the Halifax, Dartmouth, and Bedford police forces and from the RCMP, had spent endless hours trying to persuade local prostitutes to cooperate with them. The death of Annie Mae Wilson could cost the officers their credibility in the street. They knew the prostitutes might think their pimps still had the upper hand. The task force could not help Annie Mae because she would not let the officers get close to her. Before her body was even taken to the morgue for an autopsy, police were planning a news conference in an effort to exercise damage control. The message would have to get out that Annie Mae had not been under the protection of the task force, and that her death was unrelated to the struggle between police and the Scotian pimping ring. Senior police officers called a quick news conference on the morning after Annie Mae was killed. They explained to local reporters that her death had nothing to do with the work being conducted by the task force and that it would not stand in the way of their mission to run the pimps out of town.
    Ironically, in her death Annie Mae did something she would never have done in her life. She provided a powerful boost to police in their attempt to successfully combat pimps who were running girls from Halifax-Dartmouth to Montreal, Toronto, and other major centres. Hearing that she had been killed, a seventeen-year-old girl she had befriended finally decided not only to stick to her decision to testify against her violently abusive former pimp, but to stay out of The Game for good.
    That Stacey Jackson even survived to make those choices was, in large part, because of her friend Annie Mae’s bravery. In August 1992, the two Nova Scotia teenagers were in Toronto, and in the middle of a real-life horror story that made even the worst experiences of their young lives seem inconsequential by comparison. Annie Mae stood numbly in a dingy downtown pool hall and listened as her pimp and Stacey’s