by Rachel Lloyd
I try to shake my head, to show that no, I would never try to play you, but the knife is too close and I feel it graze my skin.
“I’m going to give you one more chance. Do you want it?”
My throat’s so dry I can barely get the word yes out.
“OK, so repeat after me . . . I will not be unloyal.”
For some reason, it sticks in my mind that the correct word is disloyal and that his word unloyal is actually not a word at all, but I have no doubt what announcing this fact will do.
“I will not be unloyal.”
“Again.”
“I will not be unloyal.”
“Did I tell you to stop saying it? Keep fucking saying it.”
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.”
The time on the clock radio says 3:14 a.m. I wonder how long I will sit here on my knees trying not to move against the knife or fall on any of the broken glass on the floor. I pause in my mantra and feel the pressure of the knife again.
“Who told you to stop? Don’t you dare fucking stop. Look into my eyes.”
His eyes, the beautiful doe eyes that I first fell in love with, are now wild, pupils dilated, and yet still hard to look away from.
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.”
My tears and the blood on my face feel dry and crusty and I’ve stopped shaking. I keep repeating the phrase over and over, watching JP’s face relax as he hears me pledge allegiance over and over again. I try to think of other things but it’s hard. I wonder why tonight I’m considered “unloyal” and what could’ve possibly happened between going to sleep and waking up to this. I wonder if it would be possible to kill him with the knife he now holds to my throat when he falls asleep. He must sense my thoughts, as the knife pushes in a little deeper and a new lecture begins on the perils and consequences of unloyalty.
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” I’m believing it. His eyes remain centered on mine. I feel sucked in. Mesmerized. I think of the snake Kaa from the Jungle Book with his hypnotizing eyes. I can no more look away than run away.
By 6 a.m., outside light is beginning to enter the tightly closed curtains, but it feels like there is no other world than the one that exists between our locked eyes, between the knife at my throat and the man who holds it. “I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” Exhaustion is setting in. My legs feel dead; I want to shake out the pins and needles but I still don’t move. Shock and fear have turned to a gradual sense of resignation. I will be here forever, proving my loyalty.
Sometime around 8:30 a.m., JP begins to show signs of tiredness. He leans back on the couch and takes the knife from my throat. I continue, “I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” My words are slurring from exhaustion and my eyelids keep closing, but I cannot stop. I must convince him.
Finally he’s satisfied. “I believe you. But remember what will happen if you betray me.”
I nod, totally numb. “I love you,” he says.
I cannot hear this, cannot comprehend this. I just nod again. He reaches out his hand and helps me up off the floor. Suddenly tender and quiet, he brushes my hair off my face. I wince at the touch, the bruises and welts on my face more painful now that the alcohol has worn off.
“I’m not sure why I did this.” I think he’s talking about me, but he gestures to the wrecked living room. He looks a little bewildered and then takes me by the hand and leads me to the bedroom. I let myself be led. We lie down side by side in the dark. Within moments, he’s asleep, snoring. I lie awake, my body exhausted, my mind unable to sleep.
I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal, I think.
One of the first books I read after coming to New York was Dr. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery. As I read this expert take on the effects of trauma on prisoners of war, hostages, domestic violence, and sexual abuse victims, and how they might bond and identify with their abusers/captors, I began to recognize my own experiences. Dr. Herman wrote of concepts like Stockholm syndrome, battered woman’s syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, terms I’d never heard of, yet that instinctively made sense in the context of my experiences. I read the book with a mixture of wonderment and horror, alternately crying and taking copious notes. Here I was on page 215, too scared to leave, too numb to fight back! Here I was on page 327, making excuses for my abuser, willing to defend him at all costs! I just knew the book was written for me, even if Herman never referenced girls in the sex industry. I read the book over and over, trying to make sense of everything that I’d experienced within this new framework. Perhaps it hadn’t been all my fault.
“Why didn’t you just leave?” In the first few years after I left the life, I was asked that frequently. Embedded in the question were unspoken accusations: How could you be so weak/stupid? Was it because you deserved/liked it? In the beginning, I would constantly ask myself the same question, the accusatory subtext included. In truth, I didn’t know why I stayed and I hated myself for doing so. Yet as I began to work with strong, smart, brave girls who’d stayed with their abusers and who in spite of all the violence and exploitation continued to profess abject devotion—“But I love him”—I couldn’t see them as weak or stupid. Instead I started to see a pattern. The girls I met—Melissa, Christine, Audrey, Tanya—were already bruised and vulnerable from the adults in their lives when they met the adult men who would seize on their vulnerability like sharks smelling blood in the water. The same tactics would be used over and over again—kindness, violence, kindness, a bit more violence. I watched helplessly as girls were jerked back from every attempt at independence by some invisible bungee cord, one end attached to the men they “loved,” the other wrapped tightly around their necks.
Yet while I intuitively felt their struggle, I didn’t really understand how to help them break free when I had struggled so much myself. How could I explain the girls’ seemingly illogical behavior (and, of course, implicitly my own) to unsympathetic audiences, social workers, cops, judges, and family members? How could I help people actually see the invisible rope? In the social service community, we had slowly begun to recognize that there were all types of reasons—psychological, emotional, financial, practical—that kept adult women in domestic violence situations. Yet when it came to girls and young women in the life, it seemed hard for people to make the connection.
In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.
In 2002, a fourteen-year-old girl from Utah, Elizabeth Smart, was kidnapped from her bedroom at gunpoint. Nine months later, after a police sketch of the suspect had been released, Elizabeth was seen with an older couple walking down the street in a nearby Utah suburb, and witnesses notified the police. When police confronted the trio
and took Elizabeth aside, she repeatedly denied that she was Elizabeth Smart, stating that her name was Augustine Mitchell (taking the surname of her abductors). When she eventually admitted her identity, she showed concern for her abductors and frequently asked the police about their well-being. Elizabeth was returned safely to her family, and her father asked the press to respect his daughter’s ordeal and not discuss any sexual abuse that she might have suffered.
In the subsequent media frenzy after her rescue, experts and pundits talked about her initial response to law enforcement and attributed her identity denial and loyalty to her abductors as “brainwashing,” “Stockholm syndrome,” and “mind control.” While some of the explanations of brainwashing were a little simplistic, the media, the public, and law enforcement all readily accepted and understood that Elizabeth’s unexpected response to her own rescue was a result of a serious trauma and psychological dependency. While some were initially surprised that Elizabeth had been, at various times throughout the nine months, only blocks away from her family’s home and yet did not ever attempt to escape, and had been stopped by the police previously to her identification without ever disclosing who she was, no one ever doubted her legitimacy as a victim.
In 2007, Shawn Hornbeck, a boy who had been kidnapped four years earlier, was found still living with his captor. He’d been seen riding around the neighborhood on a bike and had seemingly been “free” to leave. Yet again, everyone immediately understood that he’d experienced a severe form of trauma and that while the door may have been open physically, in Shawn’s mind he was no more free to leave than if he had been chained to a wall. Whatever happened to Elizabeth Smart and Shawn Hornbeck in those first few days, those first few terrifying weeks, was enough to convince them that they were unable to leave, that their best chance for survival was to comply and bond with the person who had the power to keep them alive.
Psychologist Dee Graham identified four factors that need to be present for Stockholm syndrome to occur: a perceived threat to survival and the belief that one’s captor is willing to act on that threat, the captive’s perception of small kindnesses from the captor within a context of terror, isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor, and a perceived inability to escape. The key consideration is the victim’s perception. It doesn’t matter if those on the outside believe that the victim had an opportunity to escape, that the threat wasn’t really as great as the victim thought it was, or that the kindness shown was trivial and ludicrous in the face of the violence involved. All that matters is that the victim believes these things to be true. Bonding to their captor/abuser is simply a survival mechanism born out of great psychological fear and oppression.
There are no studies that suggest that it takes a “weak” personality to succumb to Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonding, but clearly children are more vulnerable and more easily convinced that their abuser has the power to carry out all and any threats. It is not surprising that they would bond more quickly than adults to their abusers. And yet while children like Shawn Hornbeck, Elizabeth Smart, and even those who have become adults during their captivity like Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natascha Kampusch are rightly seen as blameless victims, domestically trafficked girls under the control of a pimp are usually seen not as victims but as willing participants.
Yet many of these girls experience the same types of psychological conditions necessary for Stockholm syndrome to develop. Pimps make sure to isolate trafficked and exploited girls from perspectives other than their own. They often refer to families and friends as “the square world,” and work hard to convince a girl that these people don’t really care about her, don’t love her the way he does, have never really been there for her. Traveling and being taken to cities where she knows no one and is on unfamiliar territory are also common. Everyone she meets is in some way connected to the life; her entire world becomes pimps, johns, and other victimized girls. Her wives-in-law are traumatized and bonded already, unable to offer a different perspective. Johns, by virtue of buying her, also reinforce the belief that this is who she is, what she deserves, that it’s not worth running away because she has nothing to run home to. Even in rare interactions with social workers, emergency room personnel, passersby, rarely is she exposed to a different perspective or at least to one that could help her. Her pimp’s already warned her that the “squares” are not to be trusted and will just judge her and make her feel worthless. After a while, the life, the game, becomes her only true reality. Squares are stupid. Dumb girls give it away for free. It’s normal to share your man with four other girls. Giving him your money is for the best, as you wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.
Over the years I’ve heard girls at GEMS say that their pimps have called me “the poison pimp” because I try to poison the girls’ minds against the truth. One girl who was court-mandated to GEMS as an alternative to incarceration tells me that her pimp has warned her that we will try to “brainwash” her and that she shouldn’t believe anything we say. I ask her why she thinks he said that, and after a few minutes of deep thought, she says, “perhaps cos he’s brainwashing me.” For a moment, I think she’s had a revelation, but if so, it’s short-lived, as minutes later she’s telling me how good he is to her, how much she deserves the beatings.
Of course, it takes more than simply isolation from other perspectives to develop the intense relationship with their abusers that clinicians call trauma bonds. Even if the grooming period is full of promises and “love,” there comes a point where the pimp will begin to exert force and control in order to develop the strongest levels of loyalty and submission. In a book on rape, Drs. Lorenne Clark and Debra J. Lewis assert that “all unequal power relationships must, in the end, rely on the threat or reality of violence in order to maintain themselves.” For commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls, the perception of threats is almost always based on the reality of violence. Girls believe that their pimps will act on their threats to hurt, to maim, to kill, and with good reason. So many of these girls have experienced rape, had guns held to their head, heard their trafficker talk about other girls he’s killed—enough violence, in other words, to ensure that girls are hesitant about running away. One girl I worked with, Marlene, went on a date to a bowling alley with a guy she’d met at the train station. Upon leaving the bowling alley, she was thrown into a van by her date and his accomplice and had her identification taken away. Her kidnappers knew that the address on her ID was her grandmother’s and so they threatened to go to her family’s house to kill them if she tried to escape. Marlene was taken to the basement of a house and shown a wooden pole with torn duct tape around it and then shown a vast array of weapons: swords, hunting knives, machetes, and nunchucks. She was told that this was where girls who were disobedient were brought. When Marlene was told that she had to work the streets, she complied. For several weeks, she worked hard to be obedient and trustworthy, although her pimp rarely let her out of his sight. When she overheard that she was to be sold to another pimp and taken out of state, she decided to try to escape. Because she’d been so submissive, doing everything she was told, her pimp finally left her alone for a few hours and she ran to the nearest phone and called her mother.
Her mother called us and we called the police, who went to pick her up. I drove out to meet her at the precinct. When I arrived, Marlene was being interrogated, accused of lying and being questioned as to why she hadn’t tried to escape sooner. To me, Marlene had done everything she needed to do to stay alive, and had been smart and strategic about her survival. To the police officers, because she hadn’t been chained up for her captivity and because she acknowledged complying with her abuser’s orders to be sold for sex, there was no way she’d been kidnapped, no way she was really a victim. Marlene was able to provide an address and a name; her pimp had a record for assault and kidnapping, and yet the police refused to pick him up, citing lack of evidence. I spent a long and frustrating night arguing with two male officers who simply would not un
derstand that Marlene’s perception of threats to her survival was real and justified and that her actions were totally understandable. I was glad that these weren’t the police officers who had found Elizabeth Smart.
In Marlene’s case, her compliance with her captor kept her alive and reduced the occurrence of violence and harm. While she hadn’t yet reached a stage of bonding with her abuser, the critical factors for Stockholm syndrome were certainly in place.
Angelina’s been coming into the office for a few weeks now, referred by her social worker due to a yearlong stay in a juvenile detention center on a prostitution charge. Long and gangly, all limbs, with mild acne, at sixteen she’s every bit an awkward adolescent. I’m the first person she meets on her arrival and we bond a little, although she’s reserved and hesitant to talk much about her experiences. She does, however, read a newspaper story that hangs in the front of the office about my experiences in the life, and seems to appreciate this fact about me. While she’s assigned to a caseworker, Angelina seems to gravitate toward me every time she comes in and slowly starts opening up, more and more, with each visit. I learn that she ran away at twelve although she’s quick, too quick, to defend her family, and simply puts her running away down to “wanting to be grown.” Something about the way she talks, particularly about her family, doesn’t sit right with me, though. There’s so much bubbling silently under the surface. Smart and thoughtful, Angelina strikes me as the kid who was trained a long time ago to keep secrets. Angelina, both book and street-smart, has been working on her GED since she came home. She has lots of questions for me—“Did you love your daddy?” “Where did you go to school?” “How did you leave him?” “What do you have to do at work every day?”—and seems to ponder the answers carefully, as if trying to decide what might work for her, where she might end up.
She sits quietly nearby, asking to help with whatever project I’m working on. One day, as she sits helping me file, she suddenly blurts out, “I miss him.” I have no doubt who the “him” she’s referring to is: her pimp, Suave, a thirty-five-year-old man who recruited her when she was twelve, less than a few hours after she first hit the street. Suave’s currently in jail, although unfortunately not for what he did to Angelina.