Girls Like Us (2 page)

I try again, desperate to find her mistaken. “What’s your date of birth, hon?”

“Twelve, eleven, ninety-five.”

Yup, we are in June 2007. I take a hard look at her, past the shapeless outfit and the wary eyes, to the puppy fat and the fear, and I know that she is telling the truth. I want to throw up. I can’t seem to find my protective wall, my shut-down switch that ten years of working with sexually exploited children has taught me to internally access. Meeting girls ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old had become routine, however sad and horrific. But eleven? Not even a teenager, still very much a child. A child being bought by adults? Shit. I’m hoping that the Port Authority police were wrong and that she hadn’t really been sold as they suspected.

A million emotions jostle for control, but since I’m in a session, I try not to feel anything. If I act shocked or horrified, which of course I am, she might think that I’m horrified
by
her instead of
for
her and shut down even more than she is now. I pull myself together for the moment and continue the interview. I ask a few more basic questions and she continues to give one-word answers, arms still firmly crossed. I’m still struggling and beginning to get a little frustrated with myself. My engagement skills are pretty dead-on, normally, and yet I’m being outwitted by an eleven-year-old. I feel old and out of practice as I struggle to connect with this child. And then somehow it just comes, somewhere between asking her about music (and gratuitously throwing in Beyoncé and Jay-Z to earn some cool points . . . listening to Hot 97 pays off when you work with teens) and talking about our organization’s upcoming summer trip to Great Adventure amusement park. Slowly her arms begin to relax and eventually drop to her sides and I learn that she likes swimming, wants to be a singer, and enjoys writing lyrics. I also learn that she has a boyfriend, who’s twenty-nine. She fingers the costume jewelry around her neck. “He gave me this,” she says as she leans forward to proudly show me a heart necklace made from what looks like pink glass. She vigorously denies that he knew she was eleven (despite the fact that I haven’t asked), and claims he thought she was eighteen. I nod as if I believe her, but I’m not convinced.

She warms up as we talk about safer subjects but when I begin to bring up the circumstances that led her to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the wariness comes back. She’s been well trained to give standard answers (her boyfriend didn’t know her age, she was just in D.C. visiting family, she has no idea why the cops thought she’d been sold) but it doesn’t take long to engage her in conversation about hotels in D.C. I throw out a couple of generic chain names and she’s excited to tell me which ones she’s stayed in, all the while adamantly sticking to her story that she was just “hanging out, chillin” in the hotels with “friends.”

“Do you know the Days Inn on Connecticut Ave?”

She nods proudly. “Uh-huh, I stayed there one time.”

“You know how I know that hotel?” She shakes her head, interested in spite of herself.

“Well, remember how I told you that the program I run works with girls who’ve been in the life? One night, we got a call from a girl that we knew and she was in D.C., but her man—” I pause. “Her pimp was beating her and she was scared to leave cos she had her baby with her. So me and one of my staff drove down in the middle of the night and ran in and got her out.”

Her eyes are widening.

“It was kinda crazy and a really long drive. We pulled over and fell asleep on the way and got yelled at by some cops who woke us up.”

I pantomime being woken up unexpectedly, and Danielle laughs aloud.

“Anyway, that’s how I know that hotel and that whole strip. It’s kinda rough over there. You weren’t scared when you stayed there?”

“Nope.” Danielle makes her best tough-girl face to demonstrate how unscared she was. “I kept weapons, in case the tricks acted up. So I wasn’t never scared of them. They stupid. Especially the white ones. They be the ones that want to do the dirty stuff but I wasn’t having none of that. . . .”

And finally, Danielle begins to tell me about her experiences in the sex industry. Now she’s animated, confident to be the expert, schooling me on which johns are the best paying, which hotels are the nicest, which tricks you have to be careful of. I’m trying to reconcile what she is saying with the fact that I know that she’s eleven and a minute ago we were talking about her favorite rides at Great Adventure, but I can’t. She asks me about other hotels in Virginia and Maryland, naming districts I’ve never heard of, showing off her newfound knowledge as a seasoned traveler. Any hope or wishful thinking that Danielle has not been in the sex industry is pretty much crushed. She’s been trafficked up and down the East Coast from Holiday Inns to Best Westerns by her boyfriend, who bought her a cheap heart-shaped necklace and, no doubt, the stilettos on her feet.

I want to cry.

I ask again about safety on the streets. Regardless of her bravado and claims, I know how dangerous the tracks are for any girl, let alone one this young.

“Oh, I didn’t work the track.” She looks slightly disdainful. “I worked through the computer. I had ads.”

I take a guess. “Craigslist?” She nods approvingly.

“Yup. That’s how you do it now.” A nineties baby sold cyber-style.

I flash to men sitting, pointing, and clicking to buy girls, not caring who they really are. Turning up at Danielle’s hotel room, not seeing or caring how old she really is.

Now that we’re apparently engaging in an open conversation, I’m curious how she met her pimp, although I’m still careful to follow her lead and call him her boyfriend.

“My sister introduced us. He was friends with her boyfriend.” She leans forward, confidentially. “Her and my other sister do the same thing that you and me did,” she whispers.

“How old are your sisters, hon?”

“Elizabeth’s fourteen and Annette’s sixteen.”

The room just keeps getting smaller and smaller and I feel like I need air, immediately. A family of girls sold? On the Internet? I don’t know if I still want to cry or throw the institutional beige couch at the institutional green walls. I take a deep breath.

“That must be really tough for you, hon. It seems like you’ve had a lot to deal with in your life.”

She shrugs, but then looks sad. “I miss my mom,” she says quietly.

“I know, sweetie, I know.” Except this time I really don’t.

After we wrap up the interview (Danielle actually gives me an awkward, brief hug when I leave), and I give my basic assessment (PTSD, needs far more support than the foster care agency can give), I rush out, unable to stay in the building one second more. I find myself walking along 8th Avenue with tears streaming down my face. I’ve walked forty blocks, enraged, before I realize that my sandals are cutting into my feet and creating blisters across my toes. I just can’t go home, though. My original Friday night plans are dead. I need to process. I need to breathe.

I sit down at a sidewalk table at an almost deserted Italian restaurant and immediately order a glass of wine. I drink my first glass like a shot of liquor before the waiter comes back to take my order. From my outdoor seat, I watch the Upper West Side Friday night crowd walking by, girls in groups, couples old and new, solos coming from the gym. I fight the urge to interrupt their leisurely night out. “Do you have any idea what kind of world we live in? Children are being sold!” I want to yell, perhaps for the more placid ones a vigorous shake of the shoulders. I’m disgusted by their ignorance, by their carefree attitudes. I feel ridiculously and irrationally angry at the whole world. I rapid-dial three friends back-to-back and effectively ruin their Friday nights by unleashing all the vehemence and frustration that I’ve just carried forty blocks. “Eleven?” I hear each of them say incredulously in succession. “Yeah, eleven.” If I say it enough, maybe it will feel better.

Righteous anger and honest sadness apparently take a couple more glasses of wine to temper. I feel woozy and numb, which was definitely the plan, and the desire to accost perfect strangers subsides. I take a cab home and think I’m sufficiently zoned out to sleep soundly, to leave the day behind, and yet I cannot shake Danielle’s face. It stays with me, guarded and silent, as I try to fall asleep. When I dream that night, I’m chasing her, trying to protect her against some shadowy, dream-real, unspecified threat, and yet I can’t save her, and each time she slips from my grasp and closer toward the shadows.

The trafficking and exploitation of children for sex is a global problem. UNICEF, the international nongovernmental organization for the protection of children, estimates that 1.2 million children and youth are commercially sexually exploited each year worldwide. While globalization has led to an increased number of children and adults who are traded and trafficked internationally, and to a growing business of sex tourists who journey to developing countries for the sole purpose of purchasing sex, the majority of sexual exploitation occurs within a country’s own borders and involves native children and women with native men. Places like Thailand and the Philippines are often pointed to as the worst offenders, yet the issue affects every continent, particularly those regions that are already vulnerable due to war, famine, and natural disasters. In recent years, people have paid increased attention to the plight of trafficking victims and a growing awareness that slavery, in multiple forms, still exists.

Yet it’s easier to imagine a Danielle on the streets of Calcutta, or in a brothel on the border of the Czech Republic, than to imagine her waiting for a man on the bright, floral, polyester bedspread at some motel in Virginia. Easier, too, to think of her story as an unfortunate but isolated incident, rather than a story representative of potentially hundreds of thousands of children and youth throughout the United States. Yet according to a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 adolescents are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation in the United States each year.

When I tell people that the agency that I run serves over three hundred girls a year in the New York City metro area alone who’ve been trafficked for sexual purposes, they’re invariably stunned. When I tell them that the girls and young women we serve are predominately U.S. citizens, their shock and sympathy turn to utter incomprehension. “How?” “What do you mean? “From here?” “How?” “Where?” To talk about trafficking conjures images of Thai girls in shackles, Russian girls held at gunpoint by the mob, illegal border crossings, fake passports, and captivity. It seems ludicrous and unthinkable that it’s happening in America to American children.

It’s often not until you explain that this phenomenon is what is commonly called “teen prostitution” that recognition dawns. “Oh, that . . . but that’s different. Teen prostitutes choose to be doing that; aren’t they normally on drugs or something?” In under three minutes, they’ve gone from sympathy to confusion to blame. Not because the issue is any different, not because the violence isn’t as real, not because the girls aren’t as scared, but simply because borders haven’t been crossed, simply because the victims are American.

I’m not sure why Danielle’s story particularly got to me that night. After all, this is what I
do.
I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life working with girls just like Danielle, girls who’ve been bought and sold. I don’t cry after meeting every girl I meet, nor do I drink several glasses of wine after every tough story. Over the years, I’ve learned to develop some distance, a basic ability to hear, to absorb varying levels of horrific detail without taking it all home with me every night. As any cop, emergency worker, or first-line responder will tell you, sometimes something unexpectedly sneaks in, getting through the wall that you’ve so carefully constructed in order to stay sane. Perhaps what got to me was the ease with which men had been able to buy Danielle, right there on their laptops. No lurking about in the streets, no curb-crawling in shady areas. They bought sex online from a child like they were paying a bill, ordering a pair of shoes, booking a vacation. Perhaps it was the insidious nature of her recruitment, the fact that she never stood a chance. A foster care kid, bounced from place to place, with two “older” sisters who had also been trafficked. Or was it the cheap necklace that she so lovingly fondled and the realization of how easy it had been for this adult man to lure her, to seduce her, to become her “boyfriend.” Maybe it was the fact that just a month before I had met her, the New York State Senate had refused to pass a bill that would have created services and support for girls just like her, who were normally treated as criminals, not victims. Perhaps what cracked my armor that night was her age. Even though I frequently recited the statistic that the estimated median age of entry into the commercial sex industry was between twelve and fourteen years old, and had worked with lots of very young girls over the years, there was something about her eleven-year-old puppy fat, her love of roller-coaster rides, that shook me.

Ultimately, it was all of it. Meeting Danielle that night was a harsh reminder of how much work there was still to do. All the work I’d done for the last thirteen years, everything I’d committed my life to, still wasn’t enough. I thought back to my arrival in New York in August 1997, a wide-eyed and eager-to-help twenty-two-year-old. Danielle was about to turn two years old. When I was meeting sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old girls who’d been raped, tortured, bought, and sold, Danielle was still a toddler, perhaps still sucking her thumb, learning to talk. I can see her, a chubby baby, all curly hair and smiles. A few months later, just after her second birthday, Danielle would be placed in the foster care system, due to her mother’s substance abuse. Danielle would never get to live at home again but she would search for a family in the arms of a man she now calls Daddy, whom she tells me she feels “connected” to. As I started GEMS, learning how to run a program, getting my first office space, Danielle was bouncing from foster home to foster home. As GEMS began to grow, hiring staff, adding programs, Danielle was being groomed and prepared for her recruitment into the sex industry. As I started to feel as though we finally were making progress, Danielle was being sold to her first “customer.” As I advocated for change in New York State laws, Danielle’s pimp was beating her with a belt and leaving scars across her back.