How one girl became trapped
‘We never knew about boyfriend pimps,’ mom says
Hindy Pennock would drive around in circles until the early hours of the morning looking for her 13-year-old daughter. That’s how it started.
Then she noticed a change in her daughter’s underwear, from normal little girl pants to lacy, lower-cut undies.
“We taught our daughter not to get into cars with strangers, but we did not prepare her for a good-looking guy to walk into her life and traffic her. We never knew about ‘boyfriend’ pimps,” she said.
Hindy Pennock was a stay-at-home mom. Her husband, Ray, was a businessman. They lived in a nice neighbourhood in Winnipeg with their two daughters. Then, they lost one.
For 12 years, Pennock’s daughter Jessica was trapped in “The Game,” trafficked from Winnipeg to Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, forced to have sex for money.
When she first ran away from home, she was only gone a weekend. Then she was gone for a few weeks, then months.
She would always call home, but only for 30 seconds at a time, enough to say, “I love you, Mummy. I’ll be home sometime.” Enough for Pennock to know her daughter was, at least, alive.
When Pennock looks back today, she can identify some of the warning signs she missed all those years ago. She has taken the difficult step of publicly sharing her story to help others.
“We never thought in a million years that this could happen to her. Never, ever,” she said. The Pennock family moved provinces when Jessica was 10 and she was “horrifically” bullied by her new classmates.
“We saw this bright, self-reliant little girl disappear. She just started to vanish,” Pennock said.
To help her daughter try to make friends, Pennock drove Jessica to their neighbourhood recreation centre to play basketball on Friday nights. There, she met a boy who gave her crack cocaine, but said it was just like marijuana. Soon she was addicted.
She started to lie and run away regularly. At 15, she told her parents she was moving in with her new boyfriend, but she never let them meet him. Some days she would come home with her nails painted or her hair done; other days she would come home “beaten black and blue” with boot marks all over her body. Jessica was silent when her parents asked what was going on.
Her mother said they went to the police, to psychiatrists, teachers and doctors, but no one could help.
“Just let her know that you love her and one day she’ll come home,” Pennock was told time and time again.
Often the only place parents with trafficked children can seek help from is advocacy organizations that work directly with victims and understand the power dynamic at play between pimps and girls, social workers told the Star.
Carly Kalish, a therapist who works with trafficked victims at East Metro Youth Services, says she often fields crisis calls from helpless parents. One mother rings her every time she hears from her teenage daughter, who is living with her boyfriend and being coerced to work in the sex trade.
“She asks me what she can say to make her come home,” Kalish said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Diane Sowden, co-founder of the Children of the Street Society, told the Star she started up the B.C.-based advocacy group after losing her own daughter to The Game.
She still remembers the date her daughter left home: June 5, 1993 — three days after her 13th birthday.
It was a man in his mid-20s who lured the young girl to the streets.
“He started grooming her, telling her she didn’t have to listen to her parents, that she was more mature than what her parents were giving her credit for, that she was old enough to make her own decisions,” Sowden said.
One day he invited her to a party and handed her a joint that was laced with something far stronger.
By14, she was an addict who was sold from one pimp to another for a drug debt.
Pennock’s and Sowden’s daughters escaped The Game scarred and broken, but alive.
Both women became pregnant while they were being trafficked and both have children now in foster care.
When Pennock got her daughter back three years ago, she said it felt like “a miracle.”
“We are educated people. We did not know that by letting Jessie go play basketball in a recreation centre in our neighbourhood that this could happen to her,” she said.
“Other parents have to know this.”
Some days she would come home with her nails painted or her hair done; other days she would come home “beaten black and blue” with boot marks all over her body. Jessica was silent when her parents asked what was going on