Girls Like Us (18 page)
Authors: Rachel Lloyd
Larger social forces have stripped most of these young people
of any meaningful childhood. . . . In fundamental ways, they
have never gotten to be children and now they are being cast
as nonchildren. . . . These youths have not been afforded the
protection presumed to be part of childhood, and yet the
harshness of their lives frequently is disregarded or minimized,
even while their presumed responsibility and guilt worthiness
are used to justify punitive responses against them.
—M. A. Bortner and Linda M. Williams,
Youth in Prison: We the People of Unit Four
Horizon Juvenile Center is baby jail. Of course, you’re not supposed to call it that, and in all fairness it is definitely a far cry from New York’s major jail facility, Rikers Island. But essentially it’s baby jail: juvenile detention for children, both boys and girls, under the age of sixteen. While the facility itself is a marked improvement over the old building that it replaced, it is still very much an institution designed not for therapy or rehabilitation, but to hold and detain children. The doors are locked, there are Juvenile Justice officers monitoring the hallways, and the kids wear blue jumpsuits and line up against the wall to count off by number before every “movement” to another locale. Both boys and girls are kept in the detention center, although they’re in separate units. A handful of the girls are in for serious crimes—assault, robbery, and, rarely, murder—but most are in for minor crimes: petty larceny, minor drug charges, and fighting, often the type of after-school fight that my friends and I once had without any consequences, but that in a post-super-predator world gets kids, especially kids of color, locked up with alarming regularity.
For the first few years, I do outreach to the facility, conducting workshops and meeting one-on-one with the girls. Eventually that task is left to an outreach team made up of young women who have graduated from GEMS and who are more like peers to the never-ending stream of twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old girls than I am, as I reach my late twenties and early thirties and become “old” in the girls’ eyes. Today, at the request of her lawyer, I’m here to meet with a girl who’s appearing in court on prostitution charges. She’s been holding a lot of information back, information that could probably help her case, and her lawyer is hopeful that someone from GEMS will be able to break through and provide a treatment recommendation for the judge. I walk through the hallway and see girls in their shapeless jumpsuits lined up against the wall, counting down. “Four, five, six . . . Rodriguez, Rodriguez! Are you listening. Count!”
“Oh, my bad, miss. Uh, six? Wait, start over.”
I’m struck, as always, by how young they all are. Swallowed by their massive jumpsuits, they look more likely to be playing double Dutch than to be in lockdown. I’m reminded of when I used to come to do outreach and would eat lunch in the cafeteria with the girls, a fact that staff seemed to be both disdainful of and perplexed by. On one of my first days there, we’d all been lined up with our trays at the lunch counter and the girls had all received a milk carton. One of the cafeteria workers nodded to me. “Gotta give ’em that, for their nutrition. They still growing.”
And that pretty much sums up juvenile detention for me. Children who still require nutritional supplements are locked up.
It’s with this in mind that I meet Keisha, a brown-skinned, heavyset girl, her frame more commonly referred to in the streets as
thick
. Keisha’s thickness is evidently puppy fat and the childlike roundness of her face points clearly to her age, thirteen. We make small talk and then her lawyer and I try to impress upon her the importance of staying calm in court; on her last court appearance she had cursed out the court officer, who she says grabbed her arm too roughly. Keisha is uninterested in this discussion and would rather talk about a boy, Troy, she has met in detention. She talks about the kites, the little folded notes, that they send each other; about another girl who likes him and how she had to “check” the girl for her interest in her man. Keisha’s been in the detention center for only two weeks and has had very little interaction with Troy, who is on another unit, but like most girls her age, it takes very little for a relationship to qualify as such. Especially in detention, where there is little to do to pass the time and kites may be the only mail that the teenager gets, relationships bloom, flourish, and die with breathtaking rapidity. A few stolen glances in the hallway, a message passed from his friend to her friend, and now Keisha draws love hearts all over her kites and signs them,
Your one and only true love, 4ever
. Keisha is excited about this new relationship, and after twenty-five minutes, it’s clear she’ll chatter about Troy all day without ever taking a breath if I don’t interrupt. Keisha is reluctant to address the charges of prostitution that are facing her today, but I explain that although I know that she’s probably tired of telling her story, I need to ask her questions so that I can talk to the judge. I already know the details of her arrest, but I need the background story and I have to help her decide if she wants to press charges against her pimp.
With a deep, dramatic sigh that only a teenage girl can utter, Keisha begins to tell me what happened the night of her arrest. After just a month on the track, she had caught a date with a middle-aged white man who to her looked the same as all her previous tricks. The man asked her if she would have sex with him, and as she had been trained, she asked him if he was a cop. Once he said no, she told him it would be fifty dollars. Once the verbal agreement for sex had been made, the man went on to request a hotel date. Keisha had not yet been on a hotel date and did not understand what she was expected to do. The man stated that he wanted to “Fuck the shit out of you.” Still a little confused about the rules covering this type of arrangement, Keisha then asked to borrow the man’s cell phone so that she could ask her pimp how much she was supposed to charge. Her pimp, who was standing just a few feet away from the car, yelled at her for her stupidity and told her to charge one hundred fifty dollars. Immediately after this exchange, the man in the car told Keisha she was under arrest and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. From the car, Keisha saw more cops pull up in another car and arrest her pimp. Keisha was particularly peeved that the officer had lied when she’d asked him if he was a cop. Conventional wisdom on the track teaches that a cop may be undercover but when asked directly if he is a cop, he is not allowed to lie. With the prevalence of movies and TV shows depicting undercover cops, it remains a mystery to me why so many girls believe this to be true.
Once at the precinct, Keisha says the officers yelled at her and told her she was dumb for having a pimp, and that then they asked her if she wanted to press charges against him. In their report, the officers felt that Keisha was “resistant” to their interrogations. In Keisha’s words, “I told them, ‘Fuck you.’ ” The following morning her pimp was released on twenty thousand dollars bail and now Keisha remains, four months later, in a juvenile detention center charged with an act of prostitution.
While the arrest of the pimp, and the fact that she called her pimp from a police officer’s cell phone, made Keisha’s story particularly unique, the process of proposition and then arrest wasn’t. It is not unusual for cops to talk dirty to the girls they are arresting. Familiar, too, were the complaints from the police that Keisha was resistant to help: “She didn’t want to talk to me.” The absurdity of having an explicit sexual conversation with a girl who is being abused by adult men every day, then arresting her and expecting her to talk to or “snitch” on the man she loves to the same male officers who had treated her both as a sexual object and as a criminal, was startling.
The fact that Keisha’s pimp had been released the next morning and was now free to have his friends make threatening phone calls to her auntie’s house only reconfirmed her decision to stay silent. We discuss her concerns for her auntie’s safety, given that her pimp lived in the same neighborhood, and talk for a while about possible placement options if the judge is open to it. Both her lawyer and I are realistic about the fact that she is probably going to be sitting in detention for at least the next few months, if not longer. Keisha is disappointed; she doesn’t understand why she is the one in jail while her pimp is out, doesn’t understand why she, who’s been beaten and forced to make money for him, is being treated as the criminal. I don’t have the answers for her. She is being criminalized for something that has been done to her. Punished for not talking to men who have shown her nothing but disdain. I figure in her situation I would be resistant, too.
“They just don’t want help” was the comment I’d hear over and over again, and yet it wasn’t clear what help was being offered to someone like Keisha. There was no indication that anyone had explored any placement options, like a residential treatment program, other than detention. Perhaps they believed that detention would “help,” a misguided notion that I frequently heard used as a justification for incarcerating or detaining victims.
In some respects, though, Keisha was lucky to have been locked up as a juvenile, not as an adult. I’ve witnessed many girls under the age of sixteen processed through the criminal justice system and sent to an adult correctional facility like Rikers.
Not only do pimps train girls to lie about their ages, but cops often don’t want to know if they are underage. Underage involves having to contact a parent, calling Children’s Services, waiting hours for a social worker to show up, a paperwork hassle, a night ruined, chained to a desk with a defensive teenager. In New York City, if a girl is over sixteen, or at least says she is, then Rikers is standard fare. The girl is locked up at the precinct until the bus for the bookings comes, she sees a judge at some point and then likely spends a few days or weeks in Rikers, only to come right back out to the same street where once again, invariably, she’ll be arrested. The cop’s involvement is limited to processing her paperwork at the precinct, freeing him or her to go out and make more arrests. For cops working to meet unofficial, but widely sanctioned, arrest quotas that could be used to support or withhold overtime pay and other benefits, there is a financial incentive to make as many arrests as possible and a disincentive to investigate whether the kid in front of them with baby fat and braces is really nineteen.
While I knew some girls welcomed a few days in lockup as an opportunity to sleep and as a respite from the continual, exhausting demands on their bodies, that spoke more to how abused they were than to how “helpful” jail was. The cops knew that as soon as these jail stays were over, the girls would go right back. Pimps often picked their girls right up from where they were released. The Rikers bus dropped girls off in the early hours of the morning at Queens Plaza, a known track, with nothing but a subway token, right into the arms of welcoming pimps.
What I had found over the years was that even for girls who were identified as under sixteen years old, the longer stays in juvenile detention rarely resulted in their coming home and breaking free from their abusers. If anything, the forced separation sometimes just made the bonds stronger. In jail or detention, they were mocked and stigmatized, called names, and laughed at by both staff and other youth. Going back to where you felt accepted makes sense. During their jail time, unless they attended a GEMS group, nothing about their trafficking histories was addressed. It wasn’t as if they were recovering in a therapeutic placement designed to address their post-traumatic stress disorder, their Stockholm syndrome, their prior abuse history, or their warped sense of self-worth. They were lined up against a wall in blue jumpsuits, counting off.
As I left Keisha that day, she was headed back to her bunk to write kite notes to Troy. I couldn’t stop thinking about all her needs for intensive counseling, for nonjudgmental support, for love, for a family structure, all of which would go unmet while she was in detention. At least I knew she’d be getting her daily calcium intake.
I watched sexually exploited girl after girl arrested and charged with an act of prostitution and struggled with getting the cops, the courts, the families, even the girls themselves to believe that they were truly victims, when the law said that they were criminals. It was clear that there was a two-tiered response from the legal system. Under New York State law, children under the age of seventeen can’t consent to sex and are defined as victims of statutory rape, yet when money was exchanged and the girl was considered a “prostitute,” somehow she became mature enough to consent and to be charged with a crime. Even under the federal law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), children and youth under the age of eighteen who are bought and sold for sex, are defined as victims of “a severe form of trafficking,” and there was no requirement to prove “fraud, force, or coercion.” Yet regardless of their technical legal status as victims, in the real world, double standards were consistently applied. If an underage victim from Thailand, Ukraine, or anywhere else in the world was found at 2 a.m. in a brothel in Queens, she was eligible for the services provided and funded by the TVPA. She could be taken to a safe house, given counseling for her trauma, and treated, as she should be, as a victim. If the girl who was found at two in the morning is an American girl, especially a girl of color, she was arrested, charged with an act of prostitution, and taken to juvenile detention.
During my visits to the detention centers and Rikers Island jail, and in my work on the streets and at GEMS, it was hard not to see the obvious patterns. I saw face after face that was brown or black; girls of color disproportionately represented in both the criminal justice system and the commercial sex industry. It is clear that race and class make a difference in how much of a victim we believe you are. Many of these attitudes go back to slavery, when black women and girls were blamed for the sexual violence of their owners. As William Jelani Cobb, a professor at Spelman College, points out, “As long as black women could be understood to be sexually lascivious, it was impossible to view them as victims of sexual exploitation.”