Wednesday, July 13, 2005 | 10:55 a.m.
When Eve Pouinard looks back on the life that took her from living with nuns to performing topless burlesque, she remembers the time she swore that she would never have sex with strangers for money.
"I said, 'Oh no, it'll never happen to me,' " Pouinard said wryly. "I hear that from the girls all the time. Well, it happened to me."
Forty years ago, Pouinard was a prostitute. She was lucky: she got out of "the game" and got an education and a good job. She tried to forget, but she couldn't erase the time in her naive youth when she was sold a dream by an abusive pimp.
So she found her calling trying to keep others from a similar fate.
For nearly three decades, as an employee in Clark County's juvenile justice department, the 62-year-old Pouinard has been working with today's teenage prostitutes, in the city experts say is home to the nation's worst underage prostitution problem.
Although Pouinard's past has been an open secret for years to those who know her well, she told her story publicly for the first time at a recent conference attended by juvenile justice workers and in a subsequent interview.
"Why do I have something special to offer the girls? Because I am a former prostitute," she said. "I've been a probation officer for longer than I've been doing everything else, yet it's (prostitution has) totally colored my whole life."
Every Thursday for the past year, Pouinard has met with the 16 teenagers in the GIRLSS program, operated by the WestCare treatment center. Run by the county, it stands for Girls Intermediate Residential and Living Support Services and is intended to address the special needs of female juvenile delinquents.
About a third of the girls in the program have been involved in prostitution, Pouinard said, and the others are engaged in behavior that puts them at risk to be drawn into the business.
Pouinard doesn't know if she manages to get through to the girls. It's tough to penetrate their hardened denial and the insularity of the prostitution game. Currently, she said, there are two whose talk is no longer of the streets but of jobs and school credits. But Pouinard knows it can take years to get out.
"I think it's a start," Pouinard said. "Am I real hopeful about it? It's not enough. I just hope that I start the process and get them to think."
In her Thursday night sessions, Pouinard shows the girls videos and slides -- sex education materials, segments from "Oprah" -- but mostly she just talks to them as someone who has been there.
Pouinard wasn't a teenager when she got "turned out," or sold for sex, by a man she fell in love with who turned out to be a pimp. But she says she might as well have been, she was so naive and immature.
She grew up more sheltered than most. Born in France and raised in Quebec and New Orleans, Pouinard lived at a Louisiana convent from the time she was 12 until she was 16.
By the time she moved away from home to attend a community college in North Carolina, her cloistered adolescence had made her extraordinarily susceptible to men's attentions.
"Anybody who was nice to me, I thought was terrific," Pouinard said. One prominent man with whom she had an affair "sent over a limo and treated me nice. So I went to bed with him." He wasn't the only one.
Pouinard considered herself a good girl, but she had a taste for adventure. In 1963, some girls she knew who worked as strippers convinced her to drive across the country to Los Angeles with them, and soon she was a stripper too.
"I had big boobs in the days before silicone, and I was a good dancer," she recalled. When she started performing in burlesque shows, "I had never taken my clothes off before and I was scared to death. But I worked very hard. I did six shows a day."
There were more men; she followed them to Hawaii and to San Francisco, taking her clothes off at places with names like Big Al's and the Peppermint Twist. In a newspaper advertisement for a show at a place called the Bunny Room, she was billed as "That French import -- Eve St. Pierre."
Then she met the man she still calls "the love of my life," although with a hint of sarcasm. She would have done anything for him, and before long she did.
"When I look back, there were all the signs of abuse," Pouinard said. "He alienated me from my friends and family, he isolated me, he got me fired from jobs. He was like an addiction. I was totally dependent."
And then one day, when the couple's finances were low, he set her up with a man and told her to make him some money.
"My biggest concern was, if I do this, he'll never love me," she said. "He said, 'This is a way to show how much you love me.' " Crying, she did what her boyfriend -- now her pimp -- had asked of her.
After that, there was no turning back. Pouinard was involved in prostitution for six years. The experience left her with no illusions about the sex trade.
"He beat me up more times than I could count," she said of the pimp. "I left him so many times I can't say." But she kept coming back, dependent on him and with nowhere else to go.
On Thursday nights, the girls often tell Pouinard that their lives aren't like that. They say their pimp really cares about them, or they dream of escaping prostitution like Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman." Pouinard tells the girls she doesn't want to hear that kind of baloney.
"I don't want to hear this glamorous, pretty version," she said. "It doesn't show the part where you lose your soul. It (prostitution) is not a good life."
She added, "At one point or another, they all beat the (crap) out of you."
Pouinard said everything about prostitution is worse now than it used to be -- more violence, more drugs, more extreme and degrading sexual acts. She and others say the teenagers trapped in the game in Las Vegas don't get enough help.
"Do we give up on domestic violence victims? No -- we have places for them to go," she said. But there are no safe houses for victims of prostitution, she said.
"There should be a billboard with a 1-800 number: 'Sick of the life? Call this number,' " she said.
Metro Detective Don "Woody" Fieselman, a member of the vice squad's Stop Turning Out Child Prostitutes, or STOP, program, said juvenile prostitution has exploded in Las Vegas, and more services are needed to stem the tide.
In 2004, 207 youths were picked up for prostitution-related offenses, and in the first four months of this year there were 85, Fieselman said.
Fieselman said there are many misconceptions about prostitution. It is commonly believed that many prostitutes work independently, that even those with pimps keep a cut of the money and that they choose to do what they do, he said.
In fact, few adult prostitutes and virtually no juveniles work without pimps. They turn over all their money to the pimp. And they are forced into sex work under threat of violence, he said.
Metro Police deal with prostitution to a degree unimaginable anywhere else, Fieselman said. "Las Vegas is a mecca," he said. "Prostitutes come from all over the world to work here."
Part of what keeps girls in the game is their lack of alternatives, Fieselman said. They usually don't have job skills or education; they have health problems and children to care for; they come from broken families and have little support outside the streets.
Although the STOP program claims an 80 to 90 percent success rate, Fieselman admitted that reflects only that girls who have been through the program aren't usually arrested again as juveniles in Clark County, not that they necessarily get out of prostitution. Many simply move away or turn 18 but keep turning tricks, he acknowledged.
What they need is a combination of counseling, education, medical care and other services in the long term, he said. "After care is essential," he said. "A lot of these girls get out and stay straight for a while, but after that they do slip."
Fieselman said another problem is the difficulty of putting pimps in jail. A new law that originated in an idea of Fieselman's passed the Legislature this year; it allows pimps to be prosecuted based on the word of their victims, without third-party corroboration.
Chief Deputy Public Defender Susan Roske, who heads the juvenile public defenders, has complained about the long detentions teen prostitutes face -- three weeks, on average -- as they are "deprogrammed" by police, who want to convince them to testify against their pimps.
Roske said keeping so-called victims in jail for weeks for offenses that are just misdemeanors is a violation of their rights. But she agrees with police and prosecutors that the larger problem is the lack of resources to help the girls.
"I'd like to see these girls kept out of the delinquent system, period, and treated as victims," she said. "But we don't have a secure place to place them."
Henry Cellini, a nationally recognized expert on child abuse based in Albuquerque, said Las Vegas is in a position to lead the nation in dealing with prostitution issues. "I do consulting nationwide, and no one has a problem even remotely similar to the one here," he said.
Cellini said the Las Vegas community needs to recognize teen prostitution as a dangerous epidemic. "This is child abuse," he said. "It is child endangerment. There needs to be a major focus in the community that isn't here yet."
Pouinard said girls trapped in prostitution need time to come out of denial and realize they want something better. Ironically, while many come to Las Vegas to turn tricks, in her case Las Vegas was where she got out of the business.
"I thought he was going to kill me, he beat me up so badly one night," she said of her pimp. "From him kicking me in the leg, I had a cast from here to here" -- she pointed to her waist and her ankle.
Pouinard and a friend fled to Las Vegas with only $25 and a small suitcase. Within four days, the friend had a new pimp, but Pouinard had finally realized she didn't want one. That realization was what finally got her out of the business after years of leaving and returning.
"What made me turn around was really in my head," she said. "The big thing about my getting out was changing my mind."
With therapy, she began to stabilize and stop thinking about suicide. Then she enrolled at UNLV, working as a live-in babysitter to make ends meet and volunteering for a youth services organization.
When she was hired to work at the juvenile court in 1977, she "didn't tell anybody the story," she said.
"I had to learn to live life for a while," and that meant leaving her past behind, she said.
These days, Pouinard is getting ready to retire -- her last day is scheduled for November. She was married once, to a foreigner she met twice who needed a Green Card, and had one long-term romance, which ended nine years ago. Now she lives with and cares for her aging mother.
When she tells her story to the girls on Thursday nights, they don't always find it uplifting. "The girls say, 'But you don't have anybody,' " Pouinard said.
"I say, yeah, but I have a relationship with myself.""
Eve Pouinard
COUNTY PROBATION OFFICER
archive
