Authors: Rachel Lloyd
Girls Like Us (25 page)
Despite pimps’ claims that “pimpin ain’t easy,” it actually is. There’s little reason for them to stop or to change, to choose one girl to “square up” with and start a normal nine-to-five life. Unfortunately, this is the part of the equation that the girls don’t see. Their desire to be “that” girl, the one he really loves and who will make him leave the life, overwhelms all logic. Girls who go back to their pimp aren’t going back because they “miss” the life, they’re going back believing, just like anyone else going back to an unhealthy situation, that things will really be different this time.
Girls relapse because the pain is no longer tangible. Human beings have a remarkable ability to forget pain. We all remember feeling sad, or hurt, or in physical pain, but we don’t
feel
it anymore; it’s a cerebral memory, not a physical one. This great defense mechanism probably accounts for the survival of the human race. It’s what enables a woman to go through the pain of childbirth again. It’s what enables us to date again after a soul-crushing divorce, to trust people after horrific betrayals. It’s also what allows us to pick up that one cigarette or drink after months or years of a hard-won freedom from addiction. It’s what enables us to go back to the person who has broken our hearts and who, inevitably, will do so again.
One of my favorite examples of our ability to forget pain comes from the Old Testament story of the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt and were led by Moses to the Promised Land. Most of the girls at GEMS are semifamiliar with it, either due to some knowledge of the Bible or from the animated movie
The Prince of Egypt
. I tell the girls how excited and grateful the Israelites were when they first escaped, thanks to God’s parting of the Red Sea. But the Promised Land’s a bit farther off than they thought, and so they’ve got to spend time in the desert first. It’s cool at first, but after a while the Israelites are eating nothing but manna. While they don’t miss being slaves, they miss the good food back in Egypt and forget how bad it really was, how hard it was to leave, how frightened they were, how it took many miracles before Pharaoh would let them go.
It’s easy to miss the food, whatever that represents to you, when the manna sucks. Especially when you’re fourteen or even eighteen years old. For adolescents who generally have not yet developed a sense of the future, right now feels like forever. The ability to endure a bad situation and imagine an alternative future is something that most adults develop over time. It’s only after your third or fourth serious heartbreak that you begin to realize that the world probably won’t end and that your heart will continue to beat, despite your fervent wishes to the contrary. “This too shall pass” was not said by a teenager. Combine normal human behavior with short-term adolescent thinking, add in the complexities of Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonds, with the persistence of a skilled manipulator, and it’s not that surprising that girls struggle so much with returning to the life.
Jasmine has been coming to GEMS for almost a year. Initially mandated by the courts, she’s infamous for sitting down with her court advocate on her first day at the program around 9:30 in the morning, and talking straightthroughwithoutstopping until 5 that evening. We joked that we could see her case managers’ eyes glazing over and that she nearly passed out from lack of hydration and food, but it was clearly a significant moment for Jasmine. She’s progressed in leaps and bounds since that night, returning to school, working part-time in the office. I know she’s still struggling with some family issues, but so is pretty much everyone else. Jasmine has real leadership qualities, is compassionate to the other girls, already has begun to serve as an informal peer counselor to some of the newer girls, and is working hard toward getting hired as an official outreach worker. One evening after my weekly group, she starts telling me about her ex-pimp and her face lights up, just a little. He was her first love, at fifteen, and the intensity of the experience is still fresh almost a year later. Nothing can really compete with those heightened feelings of love and fear and belonging, and being owned. Certainly not the day-to-day challenges of being lonely, of feeling unloved, of meeting boys who are ambivalent in their desires. Pimps are never ambivalent. They always want you. Maybe not for the right reasons, but still they want you. And I know that if he calls, she’ll go running. I pray he doesn’t.
Of course, a few months later he calls. He’s home from jail and wants to see her. Tonight. She calls me. What do I think? Should she go? Despite the desire to scream “hell no!” at the top of my lungs, I know she’s already made up her mind. She tells me she knows that she won’t “do anything,” that she’ll never go back to the life, that seeing him will help her move on. I use every analogy I can think of—moth to the flame, invisible bungee cord, alcoholic walking into a bar—to persuade her to perhaps do the “closure” thing just over the phone, but it’s too late. She’s already deciding what to wear.
We’ve agreed that she’ll call me when she gets there, call me if she gets upset, call me when she’s leaving. For the first hour, she calls every ten minutes. She calls from outside the diner where they’re meeting, calls me when she sees him walking up the street, calls me when he goes to the bathroom. On each call, I can hear her voice changing, the hypnosis of his presence taking effect. In the beginning, she tells me that it’s going well, that he says he’s sorry. I don’t believe him. Within an hour, she calls me to tell me that he wants her to go “work” that night. I’d thought it would take a couple of days at least to introduce this idea; clearly he’s hearing what I’m hearing in her voice. Jasmine tells me that she said no, and I tell her to get out of there, run. Immediately. There’s nothing else to say; he hasn’t changed and she’s never going to get the kind of closure she wants. She agrees. I wait for the call that tells me that she’s getting on the train home, but it doesn’t come. I call and call her phone but it’s going straight to voice mail. I feel physically sick knowing that once she’s crossed the line, it will be a long road back. I drive downtown.
It’s 3 a.m., and the lights of 42nd Street are still flickering. Crackheads and dope fiends roam the streets in search of another hit, young dealers appear from the shadows ready to oblige, and middle-aged men skulk nervously out of the peep shows. Cars pull up slowly alongside the curb, looking for a girl or a woman from whom they can buy sex. On some of the side streets, 45th and 46th between 8th Avenue and 9th, young girls and older women blatantly jostle for the attention of these cruising cars. On 42nd Street, by the Port Authority Bus Terminal, girls are more discreet, trying not to attract the attention of passing cops.
I’m walking in circles up and down 43rd, 44th, back down 8th, over again to 42nd, and back up Broadway, not sure what I’ll do once I see her, but I hope seeing me will pull her back from the fuguelike state she’s already slipped into. I know that feeling well. It’s like you’re hypnotized into walking off a cliff. Your eyes can see the sheer drop, you can fully imagine the pain of being splattered against the rocks below, one side of your brain is screaming at you to stop and yet your feet keep landing on the ground, one in front of the other, closer and closer to the precipice. People on either side are yelling—
You don’t have to do this, you can turn around
—and you hesitate. But then you look into his eyes. He doesn’t have to say anything, he just beckons. As if pulled by an invisible force, you take one step, then another, then another.
I later learn that Jasmine’s former pimp had taken her straight from the diner to the East Side, as there were too many cops around 42nd Street. While I’m walking around, feeling like the codependent wife of an alcoholic about to fall off the wagon, Jasmine is being sold for the first time in almost eighteen months. Less than three hours after she first saw him again.
I drive home in tears, frustrated, sad, and annoyed at myself for thinking that I could change things. I know Jasmine believes that this time she can make this work, that he’ll change in the end as long as she does what he wants. I know that she feels powerless to do anything else. But when reality kicks in and the fugue wears off, it will only be worse. She’ll realize how far she’s regressed but be too ashamed to reach back out. The memories of everyone who was so proud of her will make her feel sick inside. The worse she feels about herself, the more she’ll cling to him. After all, she’s risked everything for this and now feels that she’s got to stick it out.
It takes three hours for him to lure her back in, but it’ll be another two years before Jasmine, tired and traumatized, slowly begins to take steps back. For Sara, it takes four years. For Amanda, eight years. Eboni, Tiffany, Donna, Peaches. . . . we’re still waiting for them to come back.
After years of watching girls relapse and struggling with my own feelings of not having “done enough,” I eventually discovered the Stages of Change model, a framework often used in the treatment of eating disorders, substance abuse, and alcohol addiction. A critical part of this model, designed as a wheel to emphasize the ever-evolving and fluid nature of recovery, is that one of the phases is relapse.
To use the language of addiction in the context of children who’ve been bought and sold is not to suggest that commercial sexual exploitation or trafficking is an addiction. We should no more accuse a domestic violence victim of returning to her abuser because she’s “addicted to the violence” than we should misconstrue girls’ struggles to stay free as their “liking it.” Yet it’s important to understand that their relapse and the recovery process bear some similarities to the recovery process of addiction.
Understanding triggers, staying away from “people, places, things,” and taking it one day at a time, all intrinsic to the language of recovery from addiction, are also important components of the recovery process for girls who have experienced the trauma of being trafficked. Girls have to be equipped with skills and tools to support them through the challenging process of leaving and have to feel empowered enough to remain free from their trafficker. They have to understand that it’s normal to miss the life and to still have feelings for their trafficker but not to act on those feelings. Having conflicted emotions doesn’t mean you
should
go back, it just means you’ve been conditioned to feel this way. And they have to be equipped with strategies for dealing with the feelings when they arise.
Long-term healing requires that these girls understand that what they have experienced is not their fault. So many of these girls, their family members, the social workers, and law enforcement officials believe their exploitation was their choice. This perspective keeps them stuck. If I believe that I am inherently dirty, loose, or bad, then there is no hope for me and I might as well go back to my trafficker anyway. If I can begin to understand all the factors that made me vulnerable—the impact of race, class, and gender; the role played by my dysfunctional family; the power of the billion-dollar sex industry; the recruitment tactics of my pimp; my limited options as a teenager—then I can begin to shift the blame to the perpetrators instead of carrying it myself.
At some point girls have to be able to move past a sense of being perpetual victims and having no control over what happens to them. They need to feel empowered, utilize safety strategies, recognize unhealthy and manipulative relationships before they even begin, understand what might make them vulnerable, and take steps to mitigate that, whether it’s cutting certain people out of their lives or becoming economically independent. Most of all, they need to finally understand what makes for a healthy, intimate relationship, an understanding that has been distorted over the years and which, if not corrected, puts them at risk for victimization over and over again.
He beats me too, what can I do,
Oh my man,
I love him so
—Billie Holiday, “My Man”
WINTER 1995, GERMANY
I’ve been out of the life for a couple of months and am slowly trying to pick up the fragmented pieces of my life. I’ve been attending a small nondenominational church that sits off the American air force base where I live, doing my best to pretend to fit in with the “square” world without betraying my dirtiness, the huge scarlet letter that I’m sure is visible to all. People know I was a “dancer” but that’s all I’m willing to reveal at this stage. While there are definitely some people at church who are giving off a judgmental vibe, there are also some kind women who seem to sense in me a desire for acceptance, for love, for safety. Since I cry from the moment church begins till the end of the service, including sniffling through the announcements about Sunday School and the “Can the owner of the Dodge Caravan that’s blocking the entrance please move their car?” it’s probably not that difficult to spot the huge gaping wounds, but nonetheless I’m grateful for their support and their attempts to engage me in conversation. Sonia, a pretty woman with a dry sense of humor that I immediately gravitate toward, invites me over for an afternoon with her air force sergeant husband, David, and their two young children. I’m nervous about being around a man, worried that I’ll give off the wrong vibe accidentally, worried that he’ll be a creep, but I like Sonia and want her to like me, too, so I go. I think they sense that I haven’t had much “normal” in my life, so they keep the visit low-key. We sit around watching
The Little Mermaid
with their kids. Despite my nerves, I feel myself relaxing and marveling at the picture-perfect tableau of family life: a pretty wife and a handsome husband who seem to genuinely like each other; two beautiful, well-adjusted kids; nice furniture; American accents. I feel like I’m spending a day with the Cosbys. I decide I want to be Sonia when I grow up. Toward the end of the afternoon, my entire worldview is shaken when David asks for a cup of tea. Sonia and I go into the kitchen, start chitchatting while she prepares some snacks for the kids, and we come back out sans tea. “Where’s my tea?” David asks, and I steel myself, preparing for the scene that’s about to come.