The mean streets of Hunters Corner

Less than a week after a prostitute was shot near Papatoetoe's notorious pick-up spot, girls like 'Ashleigh' are still at work as if nothing unusual has happened. Picture / Greg Bowker

10PM Thursday

Opposite Hunters Plaza on the stretch of Great South Rd that meets Hoteo Ave, four leggy girls sit on a bench, waiting. Every few minutes an old, dented car, slows then, seeing the camera, speeds up again.

The girls begin to posture. One, her midriff bare, small breasts threatening to escape a lace-up leather bodice, arches her back, fans out her hair in the streetlight, then lifts a bottle of bourbon to her lips.

"It's a guy," says Freda, one of the Maori wardens who patrol this area. "Most of them are."

Six nights ago a girl was shot in the head here in an outbreak of the territorial battles that simmer day and night. Cop cars patrol, hidden cameras roll for faraway control rooms. And in their twilight world of half truths, lies and uncertain gender, fuelled by booze, drugs and cash, the prostitutes don't seem to care.

"Baby", a mother of three, was one of the few genuine women working this stretch. Maybe she was undercutting agreed prices, which dropped after the legalisation of prostitution in 2003. Possibly she had upset someone's pimp. Undoubtedly she was no physical match for the transvestites who outnumber straight women here tonight by around 10 to one. But she was lucky, released from hospital with the slug still lodged in place. She is expected to make a full recovery.

While one of her companions gets in a dusty Holden, Ashleigh drifts over and introduces herself.

"Has anything changed?" she muses, adjusting the shiny wide white belt round her narrow hips. Her voice is light, lilting and coy. "No, a couple of girls are away, but life goes on, y'know?"

"And where do you take your clients?

"Back to a hotel, or we just do it in the car."

For Ashleigh, what she earns on the street is just "fun money". She charges the going rate: "$80 for oral; $120 for sex; $60 for hand relief". Her real life, so she says, centres round her studies in "advancement in hospitality" at Wananga Aotearoa.

But what about the danger?

"With every job there's a risk, the trick is minimising them."

How do you manage that?

She looks bemused. "You'll have to ask Mama about that."

Down Hoteo Ave Mama Tere Strickland's and her team "minimise risks" for girls like Ashleigh. Her organisation, Te Aronga hou Anaienei, is part of the Mangere East Family Service Centre, her helpers are skilled volunteer Maori wardens who work with the 95 per cent Maori and Pacific Island prostitutes.

Mama is late. She sweeps in at around 11.30, black top sparkling, hair long and wiry, her face distinctly masculine, despite the earrings, makeup and pencilled eyebrows.

"So what do you want to know darling?" she says.

"Why so many transsexuals?"

"Because the only way they can be accepted as women is on the streets."

And why do the men want them?

"If something is very fun and has another piece added to it it might be what turns them on."

Mama Tere is outraged when I ask how transsexuals can offer "full sex".

"How do you do it - missionary style?"she flashes, before explaining the transgender "girls" sometimes "make a pouch".

Mama says legalisation of prostitution has been a disaster. "Numbers have quadrupled since that bill. When you pass legislation that says it's okay [to be a prostitute] it just opens the floodgates. It makes it hard on us, the samaritans of the night."

The girls aren't looking after one another any more. They're fighting among themselves, carrying knives meant for clients who might "turn them up". Clients play "mind games", bargain for a better deal such as not wearing a condom or threatening to go where 13 and 14-year-olds will hop into a car for $20.

"Girls are in a very different situation [from boys]. It's very unsafe for them," explains Mama Tere. "A transsexual has a lot of strength. Some girls out here are not so strong. You worry about them going out with clients."

Mama Tere says the increase in transsexuals is the result of sexual abuse at home. They'd rather be arrested than taken home. "Home is where they lost their innocence."

1.30AM

The bus rolls past Manurewa's nine bars, while wardens hand out condoms to clusters of girls. A straight girl, wearing sunglasses, goes off with a guy in a car. "Miss Lingerie" totters above me in strappy red sandals, saying she made $1300 (she charges $150 for full sex) from seven clients last night. Most come after 3am when the clubs close. "I have my regular clients," she says in that strange, super-feminine drawl of the transsexual. "Yesterday three were on their way to work. It was daylight when I finished."

2AM

Back at Hunters Corner pretty Anya is freshening her makeup after banking $550. The only white transvestite on this patch, her unlikely life includes a hairdressing job and four prison terms. "The last one really scared me".

A gorgeous girl in leather leaps out of a white Toyota for a box of condoms. The eyes of her young white client rake nervously until she returns, then he heads off in a u-turn.

The only other guys we see are brown, often wasted, shifty-eyed. "Do you know a girl was shot here this week?" snarls one.

The girls just keep adjusting their lip liner.