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JEZEBEL IN THE CLASSROOM
Tra-la-la boom-di-yay
I met a boy today
He gave me 50 cents
To go behind the fence
He knocked me on the ground
And pulled my panties down
He counted 1-2-3
And stuck it into me
My mother was surprised
To see my belly rise
My father jumped for joy
Because it was a boy
See, my boyfriend, he’s older than me,” said fourteen-year-old Diamond. “He’s twenty-five. He’s very older than me.”
On most evenings—and even during some days—Diamond could be seen strolling the streets for sex work or spending time with a much older man, the man she referred to as her “boyfriend.” For Diamond, the time that she was spending out of school was important to her ability to maintain her relationship with this man, and a critical part of her participation in the sex industry.
“When you’re a prostitute, ’cause I have been one for a couple of months now, like, when you’re a prostitute, you gotta stop going to school because it’s something that you have to do all day. And if you don’t do it all day, you gotta hang out with your boyfriend all day, or like your pimp all day. You have to. You have to. All day. And if you don’t . . . you could still go to school for like, a couple of months, you could still get your education . . . that’s if he lets you. But usually, the girls that’s in the sex industry stop going to school.”
If he lets you.
Diamond was aware of the power dynamic between her and her pimp. For Diamond, who floated between cities in California, there was often no personal choice regarding whether or not to attend school. Under the duress of this older man, she followed orders. Though she was in contact with the juvenile justice system as a result of “prostitution,” there is no such thing as a child prostitute (more on this point later). In this relationship, only he had the ability to determine whether or not she attended school—and most of the time, according to Diamond, she had to stay with him.
One day, after feeling alienated and tired of constantly being challenged to fight, Diamond wrote in bold letters on the wall: “I hate the bitches at this school.” Administrators and teachers at Diamond’s school had missed that she was being trafficked and that, consequently, the decision whether or not to attend school was often not her own. They had also missed that other girls were teasing her after one of them had spotted Diamond “on the track.” According to Diamond, the writing on the wall resulted in her immediate expulsion.
Diamond, who had previously been in contact with the criminal legal system, had been ordered by the juvenile court to attend school. The expulsion rendered her without a permanent learning community. Without a school to attend, Diamond was in violation of this order. She resorted to being with her “boyfriend” all day, every day.
“Girls are ride or die for their boyfriend,” Diamond said. “So [the police] try to get her too. . . . Usually, Black girls, they have older boyfriends . . .’cause their boyfriends have a car and they hanging out all day and driving around and stuff like that.”
Diamond’s eyes were wide and flanked with cascading false eyelashes. Combined with her long hair weave, they might suggest that she was a little older than she actually was. But when she smiled, there was a youthful quality. Her skin, her teeth, her mannerisms—they belonged to a child, one who had been through too much, too soon. After a few months of truancy and being “on the run,” law enforcement finally found her. She was arrested and confined to a secure detention facility.
“The pimp or ‘boyfriend’ that is keeping you from going to school, does he have an education?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm,” Diamond said, nodding. “My boyfriend, he graduated from college.” She looked proud.
“So why wouldn’t he support that for you?” I asked.
“Well, he tried to . . . like tell me, go back . . . go back home. But I stayed with him because I love him . . . Now look at me,” she said, looking around the juvenile detention classroom where we were seated. Then she collected her thoughts, raised her head, and said, “My boyfriend’s different.”
Different, I thought. Really?
Her eyes really tried to convince me—and herself—until they started to well up.
“Well, okay,” I said, in an admittedly halfhearted tone. “But in general, if you see a dude who’s got his education, but he’s like, ‘No, you can’t have yours,’ how does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know,” she said, lowering her eyes to the table.
“Do you think that’s fair?” I asked.
“Well, not really. But like, I’ve known girls who still go to school and do the sex industry. In the beginning, she’ll probably still go to school for a couple of months, but when the students start finding out she’s doing it . . .’cause people find out. . . . They’re on the bus. They see you on the track.”
“Like people from your school can see you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “After [kids] find out, [girls] just stop going to school ’cause they feel like, ‘Oh, nobody needs to know.’ . . . They see your face. They know you.”
What Diamond had to say about what keeps girls like her out of school was insightful. Her own experience with bullying certainly informed her reaction to school—and why she might think that it was necessary to avoid seeing other students who may have spotted her “working.” My conversations with other girls who were victims of sex trafficking revealed that the primary motivating factor for being in the sex industry was the need for money. For many girls who were actively “on the street,” school stopped being a priority, especially if they had an older man reinforcing the idea that her greatest attribute was her sexuality. If a girl attends school, there is another influence in her life. In general, it’s a game of control, and only one person can have it: the pimp. Diamond’s use of the phrase “if he lets you” was evidence of that. She, like other girls I’d spoken with, was relatively clear that in addition to not having full control over her time when she’s on the street, there was a financial incentive—something school doesn’t immediately provide.
“It’s the money,” Diamond said. “’Cause we think like, ‘Oh . . . if I go out to work today, I can get this, this, and this. If I go out to work today, I can get my nails and stuff done.’ . . . It’s usually about clothes and hair done and stuff.”
Diamond, like other girls who come from poverty, understood that education is a tool for economic success, but she was also feeling pressured to find a way out of poverty sooner rather than later, one of many outcomes associated with being prematurely cast as an adult. Along with “working” came an immediate gratification of material goods that otherwise seemed far out of reach—hair and nails done, new shoes or clothes, and in some cases a much better living environment. Staying in school, even if it could produce these things later in life, required a longer investment of time in order to reap these sorts of benefits. Children from middle-class or higher-income families often take for granted the social and material investments (manicures, new shoes, new clothes, extracurricular activities) that reflect the inherent commercialism of a capitalist society. These are influences that reach all children. Choosing a life on the street is ultimately about survival—and that’s what schools are up against. When girls in the sex trade are removed from school or sent the signal that their presence in school is problematic, they are being handed over to predators. Essentially, schools are throwing them away.
In New Orleans, where girls are trafficked in strip clubs, commercial-front brothels, truck stops, hotels, and over the Internet, Black girls are at increased risk of sexual exploitation.1 The first-ever report on human trafficking in Louisiana revealed there was a significant increase in the reported number of sex trafficking incidents between 2012 and 2013.2 In New Orleans, a city that is 59 percent Black, Paris understood Diamond’s plight and the similar dangers of being traff
icked for sex in Louisiana versus California.3
“I was out in California and they have this one [area],” Paris said. “That’s where a lot of the girls that perform sex work hang out at, and I tell you, it was just so mind-blowing to me to see that not only were they out there like damn near twenty-four hours around the clock, but how young a lot of those girls were that were trafficked. Because one thing that California does have is pimps. That is real. Houston, Texas, has pimps. They are real. In New Orleans, most girls that are trafficked are trafficked through our town . . . the girls that work here in New Orleans are [mostly] independent workers. But for the most part, those girls in California, I have witnessed it, I have outreached to a lot of those girls on the stroll, and they are nervous to even talk to you, because their [pimps] watch other [pimps’] girls while he’s out. Just like the prostitutes hang together, the [pimps] hang together. They know whose girl belongs to who, how many they have out there working, so it ranges from the ages of ten, eleven, twelve all the way up to fortysomething years old. . . . Even girls that’s twenty-three or thirty . . . ‘if he lets me,’ that is the thing.”
There it was again: if he lets me.
A recent report, The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline, highlighted the way in which girls, particularly girls of color, are criminalized as a result of their sexual and physical abuse. Nationwide, girls who are victims of sex trafficking are routinely in contact with the criminal legal system for truancy and placed in detention and/or child welfare facilities.4 This report was an important contribution to the public narrative on pathways to confinement and incarceration and broadened the lens on what has otherwise been a narrow critique of discipline practices. It has become commonplace to talk about truancy, discipline, and bullying as ways that children are pushed out of school, but quite often ignored is how sexual violence can also become a pathway to confinement. We flag chronic absenteeism as an indicator of underperformance and alienation from school, but not necessarily as a pathway to (and symptom of) exploitation, delinquency, and incarceration. Under these circumstances, it’s not a stretch for a girl to see only what her pimp or much older “boyfriend” sees. Diamond may have bragged about her boyfriend’s college degree, but just like sex traffickers, she perceives limited options for herself. The lucrative nature of the commercial sex industry provides a perverse and immediate financial incentive for sex traffickers, regardless of their educational attainment, to keep a girl or young woman out of school. This manipulated worldview often furthers her exploitation and facilitates a dynamic in which she is neither a dropout nor a pushout but instead a pullout—not of her own volition, but rather by someone who is already “out” himself or herself.
The Pullout: Sexually Exploited Children
Prostitution is the trade or sale of sex for money. For as long as our memory will carry us, terms such as “prostitute,” “whore” or “ho,” “hooker,” “streetwalker,” “harlot,” and “lady of the night” have been used to describe women who participate in the sale of sex. But here’s the thing: children cannot be prostitutes. Children cannot legally consent to sex, which means that when they participate in the sale of sex they are being sexually trafficked and exploited, usually by much older men—and sometimes by women, teenagers, and even society at large (the use of women’s and girls’ bodies to sell other products such as apparel, alcohol, or chewing gum). Any and all of these may coerce girls into selling their bodies.
Girls who are commercially sexually exploited or victims of sex trafficking are children under the age of eighteen who are coerced into selling their bodies in exchange for money. In the United States, racial disparities in trafficking are pronounced. In terms of what’s reported, 40 percent of sex trafficking victims in the United States are Black.5 In New Orleans, the Bay Area, and Chicago, the reported number of Black girls being sexually trafficked is much higher. For example, the Los Angeles County Probation Department reported in 2015 that 92 percent of commercially sexually exploited girls in the county are Black. Despite ongoing legislative and legal interventions, there are inadequate (to put it lightly) educational interventions and partnerships to interrupt the pushout—and pullout—of girls in these areas who are being sexually exploited, or who are at high risk of being trafficked.
In the Bay Area, where Black girls are disproportionately represented among juvenile court cases involving commercially sexually exploited children, there are a host of services and programs that are designed to interrupt the likelihood that they will return to the sex industry. In Alameda County, particularly Oakland—which is considered the epicenter of a child sex trafficking triangle between San Francisco and West Contra Costa counties—the majority of girls who are trafficked are between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, though some are younger.6 The Bay Area has a sophisticated and growing network of service providers who continue to develop responses to the needs of trafficked girls. Still, the voices and influence of educators, who quite often are uniquely positioned to prevent the start or repetition of harmful cycles, are underdeveloped or completely nonexistent.
Sixteen-year-old Jennifer in the Bay Area was among the forgotten.
She had not been to school in three years when we spoke in 2013 and had failed out of the seventh grade. She claimed that she was so busy “running the streets” and bouncing to and from multiple foster homes that she never found a rhythm in school. In fact, her pattern of school attendance had become so irregular that she had developed a dislike for school and decided to avoid it altogether.
“I didn’t know anything,” Jennifer said. “I was in foster care and I went to hecka foster homes. They put me out of sixth grade, and the next school, they put me in seventh grade. That’s what messed me up. So then I had to flunk seventh grade.”
As a child in foster care, she had been sent to live with a family in the San Joaquin Valley. Though we did not discuss the conditions within her birth family that led to the decision to place her with a foster family, she did mention that she had other “family” influences—none of which were positive—that ultimately impacted her decision not to go to school.
Jennifer was a “runner,” which meant that she often ran away from her foster care placements and other locations that she considered threatening. When asked why she was running, she just shrugged and replied that she “didn’t like it.” On the surface, that might look like she was running away out of defiance, but experience had taught me better. For years, I had heard justice system workers describe the conditions that led girls to run from their court-assigned residential placements in detention centers, group homes, shelters, or private homes.* Sometimes these girls were described as “incorrigible,” “manipulative,” or simply drug-addicted, without explanation. Anecdotes from Black girls revealed a different perspective. They had run away from these places because of experiences like being forced to wash their hair every day and/or use hair products that were not designed for Black girls’ natural hair texture. While these conditions may seem minor, especially if brought up in legal proceedings, to the Black girls who told these stories they were “deal breakers,” not only because these hygienic mandates were inconsistent with cultural norms for Black hair care (and certainly off-limits for girls who wore protective hairstyles like braids or artificial hair) but also, and mostly, because it was a trigger for them—a signal that they were not truly welcomed in these alternative living spaces. Some girls ran away from their placement after being triggered by the actions of other girls in these spaces.
The Department of Justice defines residential placement as “secure and nonsecure residential placement facilities that house juvenile offenders, defined as persons younger than 21 who are held in a residential setting as a result of some contact with the justice system (they are charged with or adjudicated for an offense). This encompasses both status offenders and delinquent offenders, including those who are either temporarily detained by the court or committed after adjudication for an offense.” Statistics on residential placement d
o not include data for prisons, jails, federal facilities, or those exclusively for drug or mental health treatment or for abused/neglected youth.
In the course of a group discussion in a juvenile hall, one girl offered that she had run away from her group home because she was the only Black girl there and was being bullied by the other girls. Still other girls I’ve spoken with over the years offered their own explanations for why they ran.
“Why’d you run from your foster home?” I asked Jennifer.
“Because, like, they wasn’t treating me right . . . I had a foster dad and . . . he knew I was a prostitute . . . and he was like, if he was a pimp, he’d recruit me. If he was a john, he would date me . . . and I don’t know . . . they just didn’t treat me right.”
They didn’t treat me right.
“So did you feel safe?” I asked.
“I didn’t like it . . . and they, like, talked about me. Told me I’m stupid and never going to be anything. And I believed it, and so that’s when I went back to prostitution.”
Jennifer agreed that education was important—even if she had missed years of school while simply trying to survive.
“I think education is important, because nobody can take that from you,” she said. “Even if I’m in jail, nobody can take it from me, so I want to be somebody in jail. That’s why I’m going to work hard. . . . I got kicked out of foster care. My family . . . I don’t really know my family like that.”
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