by Rachel Lloyd
Four hours have gone by as we listened to each other and wept. The other workshops have broken for dinner, and we’re still here. And then finally it’s over and there’s a closeness between us that a hundred “Get to Know You” games couldn’t have accomplished. We hug like long-lost siblings reunited, not like the awkward strangers from a few hours earlier. Sharing memories that most people are never privy to, we’re a strange clan—male, female, gay, straight, Latin, British/Roma, First Nations, a virtual Benetton ad of kids who all remember what it felt like to be sold for sex. By the end of the week, I’ve facilitated a couple of the groups, done my first radio and print interviews, stayed up for three nights with Julia and Peter, one of the Canadian boys, drafting and redrafting the Declaration and Agenda for Action that will be the official document to come out of the conference. The first core belief we write down is: We believe that the voices and experiences of sexually exploited children and youth must be heard and be central to the development and implementation of action. We must be empowered to help ourselves. Throughout the week, I watch as that belief becomes a reality. On the last night, we present the Agenda for Action at a public forum with about four hundred legislators, policy makers, and nonprofit people. The reaction is amazing, and a few months later, I accompany Cherry as we present the document at the United Nations, where it is ratified by 130 countries. I don’t know enough then about the workings of the United Nations to know that it’s only symbolic and doesn’t really mean anything, so I’m thrilled that words I’ve written are being taken seriously on an international level.
I discover that week in Canada that I actually do have a lot of opinions on the issue and that people don’t think I’m stupid when I open my mouth. Like a novice karaoke singer, now that I’ve gotten comfortable with the microphone, it’s hard to pry it out of my hand. It’s an amazing feeling to be an expert on your own life, to have these shameful experiences actually be useful, to feel the shame lifting every time you speak out about what needs to be done to help other victims. My embarrassment at not yet having my GED and my struggles with intense shyness melt away in the presence of other powerful young survivors. I see glimpses of who I might become in Cherry and Julia and Peter, and for the first time I’m comfortable with the reflection.
After my experience in Canada, I knew that I wanted to figure out how to support survivor leadership, both for myself and for the girls I was meeting. I was lucky that when I came into the field in 1997, in addition to Cherry, I had role models like the late Norma Hotaling, who founded Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE); and Vednita Carter from Breaking Free. These women and their programs were examples for me of what I could achieve, and of the fact that I didn’t have to be limited by my past. I wanted to give the same hope to other girls.
Yet founding an organization at the age of twenty-three, after a year in the United States, was challenging. Founding an organization as a survivor was even tougher. I fought hard to overcome people’s perceptions of me, the assumptions they would make, the stereotypes that they would often verbalize. For a while, I took to wearing nonprescription glasses to convey the impression that I was smart and bookish. The glasses didn’t help much once people found out about my past. Then the reactions would range from morbid curiosity to unwarranted and inappropriate sympathy to barely disguised contempt.
I realized that one of the most important roles that I could play was to give a face to the issue, to humanize survivors and challenge people’s preconceived notions about them. People would tell me “I had no idea,” as if I should’ve come equipped with a warning sign, or at least a scarlet letter. People’s perceptions of sexually exploited girls are often based on media depictions of girls in the sex industry, a Lifetime movie version, a Law & Order portrayal of a tough girl in stilettos on a street corner, chewing gum and cursing everyone out. The assumption is that these girls must be slow or at least not very intelligent. As I began to speak out at conferences and meetings, countless numbers of people feel the need to tell me how articulate I am. Initially I take it as a compliment, although I soon realize that it’s always said with a tone of surprise and a good helping of condescension. One male executive director serving exploited girls compliments me after a meeting for “learning how to dress quite professionally,” as if I’d been tempted to turn up in a miniskirt and stilettos. If I’m passionate about an issue, people suggest that my trauma history has made me angry, as opposed to the fact that I might actually be angry because girls are treated outrageously by the justice system. If I’m not angry enough, it’s because I’m dissociating. If I don’t like someone, especially a man, it’s because I have trust issues, not because the person might actually be a total jerk. People ask wildly inappropriate questions during presentations, make crude jokes, and often ask to “see my scars” as if I’m a show-and-tell project.
It’s frustrating to continually feel like you’re being weighed up against some invisible stereotype, but I work hard to challenge as many of the perceptions as I can. Over the next few years, I overachieve like crazy, graduating summa and then magna cum laude with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, all to prove that I’m more than a story, more than just my past. Often I’m proving it to myself just as much as to others, as it’s their low expectations and beliefs about me that I am secretly scared are really true.
Once I start GEMS, I teach the girls to fight, too. They’ve got to overcome prejudices that are based on race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and their histories of sexual exploitation. Plus they’ve got to overcome their own beliefs about themselves, their abilities, their guilt, their shame. Few people they know think that they’re capable of being anything, let alone leaders. The girls largely agree. Yet for girls and young women whose voices have been silenced and who have had little to no control over the smallest of decisions, the opportunity to speak out, to create change, and to have leadership roles can be life-altering.
Although I can’t take a bunch of girls to Canada and give them the full summit experience, I start a weekly youth leadership group at GEMS to give girls who are interested the tools they need to move into activism. We talk about public speaking, peer counseling, group facilitation, community organizing, and advocacy. We teach them about the global nature of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking and help them understand the bigger-picture issues: sexism, racism, poverty, the juvenile justice system, the influence of the media. Once they begin to understand that the billion-dollar sex industry that has taken advantage of their vulnerable young lives is supported by racism, sexism, and classism, then they can move from feeling like “bad girls” into an understanding of, and ultimately an acceptance of, what has happened to them. Once their anger is directed outside instead of inside, then it’s just a few steps to getting the skills in public speaking, advocacy, peer counseling, and organizing that will help them turn anger into action and, ultimately, self-empowerment.
The idea of asking others to bear witness to trauma is well documented throughout our collective historical tragedies and atrocities. The perpetrators may never be identified, much less brought to justice, and sometimes it’s not just individuals but entire systems that have failed the victims. Yet it is well known that sharing the story of what happened in the right and safe context can provide a level of validation, an affirmation that what happened was wrong and that it wasn’t the fault of the survivors.
This kind of communal sharing is most productive and healing within the context of a peer support group and with the conviction that good can come from it. Holocaust survivors who testified at tribunals, child soldiers who testified at United Nations meetings, Rwandan genocide survivors who spoke out at local trials, women who have talked to the media after surviving systemic rape in Bosnia all did so with the hope of educating people, sounding the alarm, and ultimately with the vision of bringing justice, if not for themselves, then for others.
We stay at a Holiday Inn opposite the SUNY campus, our hotel of choice as there�
�s a pool and a really good free breakfast. The girls have never been in a sauna before, so there’s great excitement. Although there’s some fake consternation and a lot of vanity about how they look in their bathing suits, as soon as they hit the pool, they’re carefree, playing like little kids. These are the moments I find myself wishing I could freeze-frame, when they get to relax, when the weight of the world seems lifted just for a little while, when they get to be children. These are the moments I wish I could capture for the people whom we’re in Albany to educate, for the cops and prosecutors who want to lock these girls up.
After the pool we sit in the sauna, wrapped in our towels. Thanks to Nikki’s short towel, I can see the crude, jagged scar that takes up most of her right thigh. A stabbing from a pimp and a lazy stitching have left her with a scar that looks exactly like a child’s drawing of one, replete with huge lines crisscrossing the original wound. Sequoia has scars on her face, these neater and better stitched but still apparent on her otherwise smooth skin. I look at Asia, whose upper left arm is tattooed with a huge dollar sign over the words Daddy’s Bitch.
I think of Letitia, when she graduated from her GED program and she wanted me to tie the balloons around her wrist. As I did, the scores of self-inflicted wounds from several years ago were still clearly visible on her arm and wrist. Or Kendra, whose pimp bought a tattoo machine and proceeded to practice writing his name all over her arms, hands, legs, and chest while his brother and friend held her down. Of Marissa, Tina, Shanae, and so many others with neck tattoos, constantly visible reminders of their abuser’s name. Girls with stab wounds, burn marks, permanent markings of the violence. There’s a phrase in advocacy efforts against gender-based violence—making the harm visible. For commercially sexually exploited children, the harm is written like a road map all over their bodies. “This one, right here, was where he was smacking me with an extension cord and this one, see, is where he burnt me with a curling iron cos I didn’t make enough money. This tat is from my first pimp, and this one on my leg is from my second. He wanted his bigger cos he was mad about the first one.”
In the sauna, as we sit and relax, or rather overheat, the girls begin to share the stories behind the scars. It’s the incongruence that always bothers me the most, the girl who goes from talking about having a crush on Lil Wayne to talking about the adult men who bought her; the teenager who likes making collages with magazines and glitter sharing an account of trauma that most adults couldn’t have survived.
It’s well known to my close friends, and even to most casual acquaintances, that I’m a certified “Wirehead”—a devotee of the now-ended HBO series. One of its most exquisitely written scenes features the middle school–aged boys who’ll capture and then, David Simon–style, systematically stomp on our hearts. The boys sit around an oil drum fire telling ghost stories, like every other preadolescent boy has done, yet for these children the stories are based on the multiple murders happening in the neighborhood. They don’t flinch when gunshots are heard nearby, yet scramble and run when a bum stumbles out an alley, spooked by their own tales of zombies, as little boys often are. They’re world-weary, traumatized pseudo-adults who sometimes let their guard slip and allow the twelve- or thirteen-year-old to come out. And the dissonance between their childishness and their forced maturity in the streets breaks my heart. It reminds me of the girls whose stories are not about ghosts and zombies, but about tricks and pimps and rapes and jail.
This dissonance is there at the excited reunions at GEMS, where the girls remember each other from the track, the psych hospital, the detention center, the group home. It’s there when nineteen- and twenty-year-olds act like thirteen-year-olds because they never got a chance to. Or when I hear that Monica wanted to go to Build-A-Bear for her eighteenth birthday; see Taisha sucking her thumb at twenty; Joielle playing Dress Up Barbie on the computer; Bianca wanting to go get her pink, fuzzy book bag from a john’s house; Evie requesting Hannah Montana school supplies as she attends a trade school at nineteen after eight years in the life; Danielle and her SpongeBob; Sequoia in a pediatric ward with cartoon curtains.
A recent memo in opposition to the bill we’re advocating for, the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, has called the girls “young adults” about twenty times in three pages, despite the fact that the component of the bill that the memo refers to addresses children fifteen years old and under. To hear them defined as young adults is as ludicrous as it is purposefully misleading, but the intent is clear in the other language used: “These are young adults who are very streetwise and who do not obey rules and are not willingly compliant with authority.” I look at Asia, Nikki, Sequoia, and Latonia and think how many rules they’ve had to obey as the property of their pimps. Or, these are “young adults who are on a life path to incarceration anyway,” with the not so hidden subtext being that since they’ll probably end up in jail later, we might as well just lock them up now. I’m shaking with anger when I read the memo, but I don’t tell the girls about it. They’re nervous enough without having to be subjected to these offensive and denigrating ideas about who they are and what they deserve.
After the relaxation of the sauna, swimming, and a steak dinner, it’s time to work. We sit in my room, piled onto the two beds, notebooks and laptop in hand, brainstorming and preparing for the next day. The girls decide to write their individual speeches, although Latonia, the most experienced speaker of the group and a veteran Albany advocate, only wants to do bullet points. “You never write your speeches, Rachel,” she points out. I concede the point. I try to encourage them not to read from their speeches, although I know if they have them in hand, the temptation will be too strong. Several of the girls have been through our youth leadership training, so they know the drill and are confident public speakers. They also decide to write a statement together that states their recommendations to make it crystal clear to the legislators what they’re asking for and why. As we throw ideas around, I encourage them to think about what makes each of their stories unique and most relevant to the legislation.
Nikki was incarcerated multiple times from the age of thirteen in adult jail and charged as an adult. Sequoia was kept in juvenile detention, as was Asia, who had actually testified against her pimp and yet was still held for two years. Latonia is the only one who wasn’t incarcerated, as she was never arrested for prostitution but instead had a PINS case (Person in Need of Supervision) due to her constant running away and was mandated to GEMS. They decide to focus on what works and what doesn’t, using the three girls who were incarcerated as an example of how not to treat victims. As they talk, it also emerges that three of the four girls were raped by cops. I tell them not to be scared to tell the legislators. They don’t need to be told twice; no one’s listened to or believed them about this abuse of power, so the opportunity to tell important people how they were really treated is one they’re not going to pass up. They start drafting in their notebooks, Asia quickly filling up page after page with her story.
The following morning, the girls are in and out of my and each other’s rooms, borrowing hairbrushes, looking for a belt that’ll match. It’s a frenzied hour but when it’s all done, I’m impressed by the four girls smartly dressed in their professional attire, slacks and button-down shirts. They look like they’re off to an internship. We’ve talked about being able to contradict people’s stereotypes of who sexually exploited girls are, and they know that to the Albany crowd, impressions will count.
Unsurprisingly, there are only about ten legislators present when we arrive; a reporter from the Albany Times Union; our advocacy partners, Cait and Mishi, from the Juvenile Justice Coalition; and a few other assorted supporters and Albany interns. It’s our third year advocating without success for this bill to pass. Still, our hope is that we’ll be able to make enough of an impression that these legislators will be able to convince their colleagues to support the bill. I introduce the girls briefly but stay largely quiet; this is about them and their voices, not mine. They�
�ve picked the two strongest speakers to go first and last, bookending the two less experienced girls. Their stories, while unique, are frighteningly similar, four girls in succession sharing about the factors that led them in, the pain they experienced during the life, the seduction and then brutality the pimps had used, the anger they felt at the systems that failed them, the way they were treated by the cops, how it felt to be incarcerated when you were the one getting beat up and sold. Even though I know all their stories, have lived through some of these experiences with them, hearing them back-to-back is heart-wrenching.
After Sequoia closes out with a plea to pass the Safe Harbor Act, and the girls take turns reading their statements aloud, the room stays in silence for a minute, punctuated only by the sound of sniffles and noses blowing. I have tears running down my face and am not the only one. There’s a sense that something powerful has just happened in this dreary conference room in Albany. Every adult in the room seems to be wondering how on earth we could allow this type of abuse to happen, how these girls, these children could’ve been failed by so many. It seems inconceivable, ludicrous even, at this moment that these are the girls we choose to punish. Joe Errigo—an assemblyman who looks old enough to be the girls’ grandfather—tries to break the silence but his voice falters, and he stops, wiping his eyes. He starts again, his voice thick with emotion. “You are all to be commended.” There’s a tear rolling down his face now, and he doesn’t wipe it away. “I promise you that I will do whatever I have to do to ensure this bill passes.”