I was a teenage runaway struggling to survive when I met a man who promised me love and security. Over the next decade, he held me captive, selling my body to strangers in sleazy motels and strip clubs. By Natasha Falle July 10, O ne night when I was 12, my mom and stepdad took me out for dinner in Calgary, where we lived. Afterward, we walked around downtown and spotted a few teenage girls standing on a street corner.
My stepdad, a detective with the Calgary police, told me they were in the sex trade and launched into a string of horror stories about prostitution. Young women like them would come into the station covered with cuts and bruises, he said. Their pimps got them addicted to heroin and crack. As I looked back at them, I spotted a woman in a fur coat and designer stilettos, smiling at me.
She seemed happy enough. I figured my stepdad was exaggerating. Back then, we were a middle-class Canadian family. My mom managed several bridal shops, and we lived on a suburban cul-de-sac.
At school, I was popular, got good grades and loved playing soccer. My stepdad always taught me to be strong, to believe in myself, that girls could do anything boys could do. He also taught me to fight. On summer days, he would take me to the gun shop and the shooting range, and sometimes we made bullets with his bullet-casting machine on our back deck.
He made me and my mom do emergency drills in the house to prepare for intruders, rape threats, even nuclear war. I thought I could tackle anything or anyone. About a year after that night in downtown Calgary, my parents divorced. My mom and I moved into a small apartment, and my stepdad and I grew apart. The divorce devastated my mother, and soon she was drinking and partying all the time. I never liked the guys she dated, men who used her for sex and a good time, and we often fought because of it.
