There are absolutely no resources to provide assistance to prostitutes. The very poor little organization where I have been a volunteer for 12 years survives on donations and volunteer work. It does not receive grants or government assistance. There is nothing. No one will ever give a woman the means to leave prostitution. There are not even any measures to assist her. At the Quebec City Detention Centre, where I went every week, the officers told me that the percentage of female inmates who had prostituted themselves once and were still doing so was probably around 75%.
Poverty is the backdrop to prostitution. Having documented the social systems that lead women to prostitute themselves, I can show you, based on my research, that, in 90% of cases, these women have been victims of sexual abuse or incest within the family. The second factor is the model of the prostitute mother. This is a factor in approximately 20% of cases. According to my research, the number of cases in which the mother was a prostitute is not very high, but the system is self-replicating. The mother herself was a victim of abuse, she is extremely poor, and so on.
The third factor is a spouse or a husband who is a pimp and who asks his wife to prostitute herself. She does so because she has already been a victim of abuse. There is thus an entire mechanism and structure. She is also emotionally dependent on the man. She does not choose to prostitute herself; she consents to do so.
The fourth factor is a combination of running away, youth and poverty. Of the women I met, 40% started prostituting themselves as minors, in other words before they had attained the age of majority, which is 18 in Canada. If it were 21, as in the United States, the percentage of women prostituting themselves as minors would be 75%.
That last factor is obviously the fact that these women live in an environment—