Streetlight Support Services

Streetlight Support Services (also known simply as Streetlight) is a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based organization that seeks to aid prostitutes in leaving the [...] industry. The organization offers a program that is composed of a one-day class on the subject of choices and an eight-week life skills-based course financed by the proceeds from a john school. Women enter into this program through the criminal justice system after having been arrested for offenses related to prostitution. These women are required to take the program by court order as an alternative sentence to imprisonment or a fine. Inez Garwood is Streetlight's executive director. The organization is based in a 92-year-old building that was once a police station at The Intersection of Bloor Street and Bathurst Street. Natasha Falle, a former prostitute who works at Streetlight, said in 2011 that she had counselled more than 800 women through the organization, 97% of whom wrote on their intake surveys that they wanted to exit the [...] industry, and 95% of whom wrote that they had been physically abused by either a pimp, a client, or another prostitute. Falle said that one of the women she counselled through Streetlight had been kept in a closet whenever she wasn't providing [...] services to men.