Clara has sparkling eyes, an easy smile, a disarming sense of humor and an impressive sense of repartee. She has barely left adolescence, but her life experience is already very full.
“I was looking for love. I had a need to fill,” the 19-year-old confides about her past as an escort. She was 15 when she “made” her first client, in a residential area of the Plateau Mont-Royal.
Sitting on a bench in a park in Saint-Léonard, she speaks in crude language about her previous life. She spares no detail of her difficult childhood, her many runaways, her panic attacks in the corridors of youth centres where she is dragged from one worker to another.
The most vivid and detailed memories come from his time in a Gatineau prostitution ring. The wads of green bills. The armed pimps who parade around in luxury cars. The clients older than his father who, visibly, asked no questions about his age.
“A teenager who dressed the same as me”
“It’s important that we talk about how we were recruited. Often, people think of a horror story and that misleads young people. Girls are recruited without knowing it.”
At 13, Clara meets Sarah*, a teenager like her. Nothing suggests that she is actually a recruiter. Her new acquaintance works for pimps in the region. Clara already knows her when she puts out a call for help on Snapchat. On the run, she was looking for a place to sleep. Sarah would end up selling her to men in their thirties: she would receive $700 for recruiting her.
“You imagine an older, vulgar woman, with fake eyelashes. But the recruiter was a teenager who dressed like me,” Clara recalls.
When we talk to young people about prostitution and pimps, we describe stereotypes where you will experience violence from your first day and where you have to be submissive. That’s why people continue to get caught. It’s a deceptive environment because at the beginning, there aren’t always problems like that.
Clara
Her “friend” Sarah drags her from party in partyintroduces her to some guys who ogle her despite her young age. She finds herself one evening in an apartment that looks like crackhouse“That’s when I realized things weren’t going well,” the young woman remembers.
A man who came to pick them up in a white Mercedes asked her for oral sex. She said he was handsome and complied.
“I didn’t understand that it was a test. Like when you test merchandise.”
He asks her if she wants to make money. Lots of money. “He talks to me about it like a real job where there are independent girls who have been doing it for a long time and stop when they want.”
A nightmare
The stories of prostitution she has heard are full of stereotypes straight out of books or TV series. She had never been warned that the recruiter could be a friend her age who looks like her.
It’s weird to say, but I had absolutely no suspicions until he made me this proposition. It’s only now that I’m thinking, “Oh, those guys were 30 and I was underage.”
Clara
The evening ends in nightmare: the pimp takes her to Montreal and rapes her. He had already posted photos of her on a well-known escort site. She narrowly escapes before meeting the man who was to be her first client. She ends up in the hospital where investigators question her. Then, she goes to a youth center, in emergency detention.
“An investigator told me that evening: ‘Next time, you’ll be careful who you hang out with, my dear,’” Clara recalls, a hint of bitterness in her voice.
His troubles were only just beginning.
* Fictitious first names