A group of Moncton women have taken it upon themselves to help working girls get off the streets. They’ve started an organization called “the street angels” and hope to spread the movement across the Maritimes and to cities across Canada.
Their goal is to provide support and to wrap their wings around those who wish to leave the dangerous lifestyle behind.
“I love these girls I really do, they have a piece of my heart,” group founder Amanda Gilliatt-Newman said.
Every week for the past four months Gilliatt-Newman along with Kim Allain and a small group of volunteers walk the streets of Moncton handing out meal cards and small gifts to prostitutes working the strip
“I make sure that they are geared up with tools of the trade condoms, toiletries, hand sanitizer things like that” said Gilliatt-Newman.
Allain said the goal is to keep the girls safe, gain their trust and get them off the streets.
“They get a chance and an opportunity to see that someone loves me they don’t want anything from me they want to give me something and they are going to be there,” she said.
Gilliatt-Newman is a recovering addict with a rough background herself. She once traded her body for drugs.
“I never actually worked the streets like the girls that I reach out to now but I am no stranger to the sex trade by any means,” Gilliatt-Newman said.
Allain also has a background with drug addiction and prostitution.
The two say they can relate to the young woman they met every week, one of whom goes by the name Star.
Fueled by her drug addiction and the need to eat, Star says she works the street every night.
“It is not an easy life cause you don’t know what is going to happen when you get in the car,” she said.
But Gilliatt-Newman says the project is showing good signs.
We’ve gotten two people off the streets in the last two weeks” said Gilliatt-Newman
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