How I Escaped My Life As A Child Sex Slave

Raised by paedophile parents amid Sydney’s razor gangs and forced into child prostitution, this brave Aussie grandmaspeaks out against her perpetrators.

- Lizzie Wilson

It’s 1942 at Central railway station in Sydney and an innocent 10-year-old child holds tight to the hand of her mother – a woman she should be able to trust. The little girl’s name is Mary Josephine Good field, known as “Little Mary”.

The photo (top left) looks like a snapshot of a picture perfect life but nothing could be further from the brutal and sinister truth.

Subjected to a childhood ravaged by prostitution and depravity inside the seedy slums of Sydney’s underworld, no one could have imagined Little Mary, now known as Maria Tinschert, would one day emerge as one of the most inspirational survivors

in Australian crime history. “I was born into pure evil – my mother Violet Jessie was a heartless woman, my father Ralph was a man I knew only as a cruel and mean monster. I was locked in a closet most days and subjected to continual sexual torture. As young as five I knew nothing else,” Maria says.

With links to razor gangs, who terrorised the streets of Sydney, brutally disfiguring victims with cutthroat razors, she was forced to work as a child prostitute. This was around the same time as notorious brothel owner Tilly Devine, whose exploits were exposed in the fourth Underbelly series in 2011.

“They were portrayed as glamorous. In real life they were as rough as bags,” she says. “They terrified me, and yet my mother, who took me into their world, idolised those women. I had no one to protect me... no one.”

More than 70 years later, Maria, 85, is a loving great grandmother who devotes her life to helping others as a community volunteer.