Girls Like Us (20 page)
Authors: Rachel Lloyd
Sing me a pretty love song as I start to cry
Tell me you love me as you wipe the blood from my eye
Tell me why the only one who can wipe away my tears
Is the only one who’s the source of all my fears
—Me, age eighteen
SUMMER 1994, GERMANY
The first blow to my head wakes me up. The alcohol and weed in my system tell me I’m dreaming, but the second blow wakes me fully conscious. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I feel another blow, close to my temple, and feel the weight of JP on top of me, punching furiously. I have no idea why I’m being hit while I’m sleeping. I’m doubtful there even is a why. There rarely is anymore. When I went to sleep, he was in the living room, smoking on his pipe, quiet and lost in his high. I don’t remember an argument. The few explanations that are offered, or rather screamed at me, are less reasons than disjointed ramblings, crack-fueled imaginings of some perceived slight that I may or may not have committed. There’s little time to understand what’s happening, much less to protest or struggle before I’m being dragged by my neck, by my hair, into the living room and thrown across the floor. I’m already crying, disoriented, and confused. My head is throbbing and I think my lip is busted. I feel wet blood dripping down my face but I’m not sure if it’s from my nose, mouth, or scalp.
The floor lamp is on and in this light I can see that the living room looks like we’ve been burgled by angry intruders. A chair is overturned, the table askew on its side, and broken glass litters the floor. The candleholder with its sixteen glasses, my first gift to him, has been smashed, tiny pieces of glass strewn everywhere. I’m not sure what provoked the rage toward the furniture that now seems solely directed at me, but JP’s eyes are blazing, wild, and I think tonight might be the night that I’ve anticipated, the night that I will die. In one of his hands he holds a wide-blade kitchen knife. I can’t help thinking it’s my good chopping knife, and I’m strangely bothered that he’s commandeered it. He sits on the couch, next to where I landed on the floor. He grabs my hair, pulls me onto my knees, and holds the knife at my throat. I look into his eyes once more and have no doubt that he is fully capable tonight of slitting my throat. I stay perfectly still and try not to cry; I know crying annoys him more.
“You’re a fucking unloyal bitch.”
I’m too scared to move, not sure if I should agree.
“I prize loyalty. You should know that. You can’t fuckin play with me.”
I try to shake my head, to show that no, I would never try to play you, but the knife is too close and I feel it graze my skin.
“I’m going to give you one more chance. Do you want it?”
My throat’s so dry I can barely get the word
yes
out.
“OK, so repeat after me . . . I will not be unloyal.”
For some reason, it sticks in my mind that the correct word is
disloyal
and that his word
unloyal
is actually not a word at all, but I have no doubt what announcing this fact will do.
“I will not be unloyal.”
“Again.”
“I will not be unloyal.”
“Did I tell you to stop saying it? Keep fucking saying it.”
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.”
The time on the clock radio says 3:14 a.m. I wonder how long I will sit here on my knees trying not to move against the knife or fall on any of the broken glass on the floor. I pause in my mantra and feel the pressure of the knife again.
“Who told you to stop? Don’t you dare fucking stop. Look into my eyes.”
His eyes, the beautiful doe eyes that I first fell in love with, are now wild, pupils dilated, and yet still hard to look away from.
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.”
My tears and the blood on my face feel dry and crusty and I’ve stopped shaking. I keep repeating the phrase over and over, watching JP’s face relax as he hears me pledge allegiance over and over again. I try to think of other things but it’s hard. I wonder why tonight I’m considered “unloyal” and what could’ve possibly happened between going to sleep and waking up to this. I wonder if it would be possible to kill him with the knife he now holds to my throat when he falls asleep. He must sense my thoughts, as the knife pushes in a little deeper and a new lecture begins on the perils and consequences of unloyalty.
“I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” I’m believing it. His eyes remain centered on mine. I feel sucked in. Mesmerized. I think of the snake Kaa from the
Jungle Book
with his hypnotizing eyes. I can no more look away than run away.
By 6 a.m., outside light is beginning to enter the tightly closed curtains, but it feels like there is no other world than the one that exists between our locked eyes, between the knife at my throat and the man who holds it. “I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” Exhaustion is setting in. My legs feel dead; I want to shake out the pins and needles but I still don’t move. Shock and fear have turned to a gradual sense of resignation. I will be here forever, proving my loyalty.
Sometime around 8:30 a.m., JP begins to show signs of tiredness. He leans back on the couch and takes the knife from my throat. I continue, “I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal.” My words are slurring from exhaustion and my eyelids keep closing, but I cannot stop. I must convince him.
Finally he’s satisfied. “I believe you. But remember what will happen if you betray me.”
I nod, totally numb. “I love you,” he says.
I cannot hear this, cannot comprehend this. I just nod again. He reaches out his hand and helps me up off the floor. Suddenly tender and quiet, he brushes my hair off my face. I wince at the touch, the bruises and welts on my face more painful now that the alcohol has worn off.
“I’m not sure why I did this.” I think he’s talking about me, but he gestures to the wrecked living room. He looks a little bewildered and then takes me by the hand and leads me to the bedroom. I let myself be led. We lie down side by side in the dark. Within moments, he’s asleep, snoring. I lie awake, my body exhausted, my mind unable to sleep.
I will not be unloyal. I will not be unloyal
, I think.
One of the first books I read after coming to New York was Dr. Judith Herman’s
Trauma and Recovery
. As I read this expert take on the effects of trauma on prisoners of war, hostages, domestic violence, and sexual abuse victims, and how they might bond and identify with their abusers/captors, I began to recognize my own experiences. Dr. Herman wrote of concepts like Stockholm syndrome, battered woman’s syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, terms I’d never heard of, yet that instinctively made sense in the context of my experiences. I read the book with a mixture of wonderment and horror, alternately crying and taking copious notes. Here I was on page 215, too scared to leave, too numb to fight back! Here I was on page 327, making excuses for my abuser, willing to defend him at all costs! I just knew the book was written for me, even if Herman never referenced girls in the sex industry. I read the book over and over, trying to make sense of everything that I’d experienced within this new framework. Perhaps it hadn’t been all my fault.
“Why didn’t you just leave?” In the first few years after I left the life, I was asked that frequently. Embedded in the question were unspoken accusations: How could you be so weak/stupid? Was it because you deserved/liked it? In the beginning, I would constantly ask myself the same question, the accusatory subtext included. In truth, I didn’t know why I stayed and I hated myself for doing so. Yet as I began to work with strong, smart, brave girls who’d stayed with their abusers and who in spite of all the violence and exploitation continued to profess abject devotion—“But I love him”—I couldn’t see them as weak or stupid. Instead I started to see a pattern. The girls I met—Melissa, Christine, Audrey, Tanya—were already bruised and vulnerable from the adults in their lives when they met the adult men who would seize on their vulnerability like sharks smelling blood in the water. The same tactics would be used over and over again—kindness, violence, kindness, a bit more violence. I watched helplessly as girls were jerked back from every attempt at independence by some invisible bungee cord, one end attached to the men they “loved,” the other wrapped tightly around their necks.
Yet while I intuitively felt their struggle, I didn’t really understand how to help them break free when I had struggled so much myself. How could I explain the girls’ seemingly illogical behavior (and, of course, implicitly my own) to unsympathetic audiences, social workers, cops, judges, and family members? How could I help people actually
see
the invisible rope? In the social service community, we had slowly begun to recognize that there were all types of reasons—psychological, emotional, financial, practical—that kept adult women in domestic violence situations. Yet when it came to girls and young women in the life, it seemed hard for people to make the connection.
In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.
In 2002, a fourteen-year-old girl from Utah, Elizabeth Smart, was kidnapped from her bedroom at gunpoint. Nine months later, after a police sketch of the suspect had been released, Elizabeth was seen with an older couple walking down the street in a nearby Utah suburb, and witnesses notified the police. When police confronted the trio and took Elizabeth aside, she repeatedly denied that she was Elizabeth Smart, stating that her name was Augustine Mitchell (taking the surname of her abductors). When she eventually admitted her identity, she showed concern for her abductors and frequently asked the police about their well-being. Elizabeth was returned safely to her family, and her father asked the press to respect his daughter’s ordeal and not discuss any sexual abuse that she might have suffered.
In the subsequent media frenzy after her rescue, experts and pundits talked about her initial response to law enforcement and attributed her identity denial and loyalty to her abductors as “brainwashing,” “Stockholm syndrome,” and “mind control.” While some of the explanations of brainwashing were a little simplistic, the media, the public, and law enforcement all readily accepted and understood that Elizabeth’s unexpected response to her own rescue was a result of a serious trauma and psychological dependency. While some were initially surprised that Elizabeth had been, at various times throughout the nine months, only blocks away from her family’s home and yet did not ever attempt to escape, and had been stopped by the police previously to her identification without ever disclosing who she was, no one ever doubted her legitimacy as a victim.
In 2007, Shawn Hornbeck, a boy who had been kidnapped four years earlier, was found still living with his captor. He’d been seen riding around the neighborhood on a bike and had seemingly been “free” to leave. Yet again, everyone immediately understood that he’d experienced a severe form of trauma and that while the door may have been open physically, in Shawn’s mind he was no more free to leave than if he had been chained to a wall. Whatever happened to Elizabeth Smart and Shawn Hornbeck in those first few days, those first few terrifying weeks, was enough to convince them that they were unable to leave, that their best chance for survival was to comply and bond with the person who had the power to keep them alive.
Psychologist Dee Graham identified four factors that need to be present for Stockholm syndrome to occur: a perceived threat to survival and the belief that one’s captor is willing to act on that threat, the captive’s perception of small kindnesses from the captor within a context of terror, isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor, and a perceived inability to escape. The key consideration is the victim’s perception. It doesn’t matter if those on the outside believe that the victim had an opportunity to escape, that the threat wasn’t really as great as the victim thought it was, or that the kindness shown was trivial and ludicrous in the face of the violence involved. All that matters is that the victim believes these things to be true. Bonding to their captor/abuser is simply a survival mechanism born out of great psychological fear and oppression.
There are no studies that suggest that it takes a “weak” personality to succumb to Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonding, but clearly children are more vulnerable and more easily convinced that their abuser has the power to carry out all and any threats. It is not surprising that they would bond more quickly than adults to their abusers. And yet while children like Shawn Hornbeck, Elizabeth Smart, and even those who have become adults during their captivity like Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natascha Kampusch are rightly seen as blameless victims, domestically trafficked girls under the control of a pimp are usually seen not as victims but as willing participants.