A DEVASTATING TALE OF ADOLESCENT REBELLION

What stays with you about Jenn are her eyes -- huge, blue and sombre in a
way that belies the fresh innocence of her face.

What stays with me about the documentary Innocent Tricks, in which Jenn and
another Vancouver-area girl are featured, is the scene in which Jenn's
mother Carol is helping her pack her duffle bag so she can come home from a
flop house where she's been smoking crack and hooking to pay for it.

Cut to Jenn sleeping between clean sheets in her old bedroom in the Maple
Ridge home where she grew up, with track-and-field medals on the walls and
pets in the yard, a loving sister and worried parents looking on. Then cut
to the blue-eyed girl heading out the door again with her duffle bag and
her habit.

This is the powerful message of Brad Quenville's 40-minute film, which airs
tonight at 7 p.m. on CBC Newsworld's Rough Cuts. "She's 16 years old," her
mother says to the director, on camera. "She should be in her home. Being
in her home should never be in question."

It's the kind of message that can turn a parent's perspective inside out,
leaving one wondering whether all the myriad tasks and trials of one's life
with children add up to even a moment inside Carol's skin. The same goes
for her husband, Brian. And for Dave and Linda -- the Coquitlam parents of
17-year-old Chantal.

"I'll never give up on Chantal," says Dave. "If it takes 10 years, we'll be
there for her."

There are 10,000 teenagers being exploited today in Canada's sex
trade. Quenville, a partner in Vancouver's Force Four Entertainment which
produced Innocent Tricks, decided to focus on Jenn and Chantal because he
feels they represent the new face of an old problem.

"What I was trying to do with this documentary was suggest that there are
different situations the kids are coming from these days, and the service
providers and the police haven't really caught up to that yet -- that there
are kids from good families out there, and they have to be dealt with in a
different way. The families have to be involved."

The duffle bag scene illustrates the new way, where the ultimate expression
of a parent's love is to keep loving. To leave the door open.

Chantal's story -- particularly the part where "the system" fails her --
illustrates the old way. Brought up with her three siblings in a religious
Abbotsford family, she determined in early adolescence that she would be
the black sheep. She was partying, drinking, having sex and getting
involved in petty crime by 15. Her parents sought help from teachers,
doctors and social workers, receiving more blame than support. Finally, the
ministry for children and families suggested moving Chantal to a group
home, urging her parents to sign a three-month foster care contract.

"It was horrible to have to tell her, 'Chantal you can't stay here if
you're not going to follow the rules,' " her father recalls.

It was more horrible to watch the consequences.

Within days, Chantal had run away from the group home and was living on the
street: "I met a whole crowd of girls and we were always into crime and
stuff," she says. "It was harsh. I was running out of options."

The sex trade seemed to be a pretty good option, pimping even better. How
she found her way back to her family and got back on track in Grade 12,
with high grades, a part-time job at Starbucks and her own apartment
financed by her parents, remains quite vague. Quenville admits Chantal is
an enigma, and very private.

Jenn, on the other hand, is transparent as glass, which makes her story
even more frightening.

She looks, and in most ways acts, like a typical suburban kid -- one who
"blew up like an atomic bomb" when she hit puberty, as her mother recalls.

"I never thought I could be so stupid," Jenn says now.

Hers is a story of adolescent rebellion that many of us will find all too
familiar -- until it reaches the devastating final chapter that is suddenly
someone else's story. Something terrible must have happened to her at home,
we say wishfully. We're not like them.

In fact, Jenn slipped through the cracks very easily, as do many kids. It
started with soft drugs in Grade 9, then a cocaine habit that her parents
helped her kick, temporarily. When she started skipping school last year,
they gave her an ultimatum: back to school, or you'll have to leave home."

It was the worst thing they could have done, they now believe.

Jenn packed her bag the next day and moved in with a friend. Within 10 days
she was on the street, heavily into drugs.

"I still cannot quite grasp how this could happen to someone so nice, from
such a nice family," Quenville told me.

"The only piece that makes sense is that there are drugs widely available
that are cheap and highly addictive. As soon as kids get onto that path,
they become different people, and their parents go crazy and they don't
necessarily respond in the right way."

The path from drugs to sexual exploitation is short and straight. "It can
happen so easily," says Quenville, who worked with counsellors, sex-trade
advocates and police to make the documentary. "The person providing the
drugs can say, well if you don't have any money right now, how about a
little sexual favour instead? For Jenn it was just a matter of getting in
the car once with a drug dealer and from then on it was, oh, okay, I can do
that. I can pay for my drugs this way."

"It was surprisingly easy to get a trick," Jenn says. And easy to avoid
detection by police. It helped that she looked so innocent, and that she
was hooking on suburban streets. She would catch the 6 a.m. commuters on
their way to work, selling quickies in cars, usually in underground lots.

"A lot of the johns had minivans with child seats in the back," she
says. "They were, like, family guys. There were even teachers who picked
me up on their way to school. None of them seemed to have a problem with
it. It was like a natural thing to do. No regrets that they're picking up a
16-year-old."

Fortunately, Jenn's parents jumped back into her path, providing
unconditional love and occasional lodging. The duffle-bag stage lasted four
months, after which she was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and
"pink-slipped" at her mother's request -- held against her will and
admitted to detox.

Jenn has been straight ever since, living at home and volunteering with a
street kids' advocacy organization called Save the Children. She is working
hard at school, taking two years in one so she can graduate high school
this June with her peers. Her biggest complaint is loneliness. Other kids
are keeping their distance. She looks at you with those sad eyes and says
she's worried she's lost the ability to have fun.

The experience of making Innocent Tricks has left Quenville deeply shaken.

The father of an eight-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son, he finds
himself gazing at his children, knowing they are not immune from the traps
that caught Chantal and Jenn. "As good a parent as I think I might be, it
can still happen. When you mix the cocktail of peer pressure with the drugs
that are out there -- sure, it can happen, to any of us."