Recently, I came across a memoir by Rachel Lloyd entitled Girls Like Us - Fighting For A World Where Girls Are Not For Sale, which crosses perspectives using both her work with GEMS: Girls Educational and Mentoring Services in New York City and her own personal journey and experience in the trafficking world.
I would encourage you strongly to read this book, along with their documentary, entitled Very Young Girls, which is available via Netflix. My personal notes, found in this blog, are only highlights, and the most moving pieces of this book are found in the individual stories, as well as the past that inspired Rachel Lloyd to found GEMS. Also, my personal interest areas reflect only a small portion of the vast amount of work to be done within this field of work. I tend to focus on legislative reform, whereas many volunteers are far more interested in mentoring and restoration, or rescue. All of these areas are equally vital to ending the problem, so reading this book will shed further light on areas I may gloss over due to it not being my specific area of work and research.
Chapter 1: Learning
"Child sexual exploitation is the most hidden form of child abuse in the United States and NOrth America today. It is the nation's least recognized epidemic." -Dr. Richard J. Estes, University of Pennsylvania
This chapter flashes back to some of Rachel Lloyd's early experience with mentoring girls. Most of the notes I've highlighted from this chapter have to do with how these children feel and react to their situations, and I hope they will help you reframe your perspective of "teen prostitutes" into realizing they are just as much victims are the girls in Thailand are.
"Fear left and all that remained was sadness and a sense of hopelessness."
"Confusing domestic violence with love."
Often on her visits to the jail, older women would point her to younger girls and tell her to speak with the kids who need help. "Implicit in their admonishments to focus on the younger girls was the unspoken belief that it was too late for them."
"these high school adolescents are 16-21 and are charged with everything from shoplifting to murder, although most are in for some type of drug charge... trafficking for a man or boy who has escaped prosecution and is now suddenly too busy to visit..."
On her visits, she shared her own story, and had to field, "offensive remarks coming from the teachers." She answers her questions "honestly and carefully." Rachel learned to choose her words carefully, so that these girls would open up to her, rather than seeing her as a know it all and an outsider.
The stories are all similar. "...got abused...when I was little...angry at men" and "...been in foster care since I was 5... family knows I'm locked up and don't even visit..."
Horrifyingly, "...boyfriend tired to shoot me and I grabbed the gun and now I'm here cos I shot him by accident. But he was beating me every day and I was scared of him. I don't understand why they didn't lock him up before this all happened. I didn't mean to kill him, I just wanted him to stop." In my personal opinion, this MORE than qualifies as self defense, and I am inclined to believe that if this was any young girl from a middle-class family, rather than someone being trafficked, the courts would have let her off with self defense or involuntary manslaughter, at the least. In my copy of the book, I have highlighted and underlined this with the words FIX THIS!!!!! I hope I am not alone in this sentiment.
The stories only get worse from there. "I had a man who was pimping me out to everyone to buy drugs... I nearly died... They tied me up in a bathtub and stabbed me in the head with a screwdriver... I thought I was going to die, but somehow I lived and managed to get out." My response to this situation is outrage that SHE is the one in jail instead of the ones who did this to her.
The sentiments of the girls towards outsiders was also made clear, "A luv-luv life, they read about this... in some book - that's good 'n' all but you lived this... I's different..." but even here are echoes of hope, "God sent you. To us. To help us be strong. To let us know we not alone and we can be all right too."
Despite being victims, "girls and women who come in are scorned by staff and the other residents or inmates alike." What strikes me as absolutely sick is that, "if the other girls and women didn't know what the girl was in for, the guards or staff made sure to announce it... To be "in the life"... was to be on the lowest rung. It didn't matter how old they were; they were shunned and mocked as dirty, nasty, hos..." It isn't surprising that, "the girls go back to the familiar, where they are at least accepted, even if that means being sold and abused. Most of them didn't have anywhere else to go."
One girl Lloyd worked with had a daughter by the pimp who had been trafficking her since she was 14. The "caseworkers looked bored with her plight and have no answers." She is "frequently impatient, downright scornful, of my lack of knowledge..." The girls have to walk in the street, not the sidewalk. They can't look men in the face. They have a quota of money they have to give their "boyfriend" who is really their pimp. Despite being brutally beaten, and running away, most girls will return in a matter of days. "Leaving the life takes practice. Girls need to try multiple times without having someone give up on them."
Another story that made me write furiously in my margins to FIX THIS!! SICK AND WRONG!! was this. "...weighed about 80 lbs... Her pimp had cut off half her hair... No program would take her: she didn't have a drug problem, a prerequisite for most programs that cater to her age. One night, she disappeared for a few hours and returned proudly announcing that she'd smoked crack and was now eligible for the drug program, but we had to hurry cos she wasn't sure how long it would be in her system." Few resources are available and few people understand what they've experienced.
Systematic violence of pimps: "crude tattoo of her pimp's name that he'd hand-carved into her inner thigh as he sat between her legs holding a gun to her head..." "...stabbed in the vagina by a group of men and left to die in the street..." and "threatened with guns, threatened with knives, sold in a club or sold on the street... lack of family support, need for love and attention, early stages that felt almost good; pain that kept us trapped; long, slow journey back to life, feeling all the while that we'd never be quite normal, that we'd never fit in - a message reiterated through family, through loved ones, through society's view of us... our backgrounds had prepared us for this... abuse, neglect, abandonment, we'd been primed for predatory men..."
Support does make a difference, but it is tough work. Stories repeat themselves from "fatherless girls; motherless daughters...drugs; prison; domestic violence...sexual abuse...running away; being put in foster care; meeting a man who made promises, made them feel safe... everywhere I look I see pain... nightmares resurface." Rachel says she doesn't have many answers so she listens, learns, trying to "make connections, be open and honest, be sincere, love them and not judge" and especially to, "be honest... about what I can't specifically relate to..."
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