Girls Like Us (3 page)

I felt like the little Dutch boy with his finger in a dam. No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t prevent a whole new generation of children from being bought and sold, from being ignored and vilified by their families, the system, the media, the legislature. Just around the corner were the next round of Danielles, girls who didn’t know what a pimp was, didn’t know what a track was, girls who hadn’t been trafficked yet.

That night it seemed insurmountable, a Sisyphean task that I’d never be able to conquer. Yet in the light of the next morning, as I prepared to visit Danielle again, I reminded myself that progress had been made. The cops she’d met that night hadn’t arrested her on prostitution charges, and although that outcome wasn’t the norm for the majority of trafficked girls, it did indicate that there were law enforcement officers who really believed that these girls were victims. The foster care agency had actually called GEMS, a huge step forward, and they’d even described her as an “exploited child,” not a “prostitute.” A few years earlier that would have been unthinkable. It was major progress that GEMS even existed, that there was even an organization to call. When I started GEMS as an unlikely and unprepared executive director, I really had no clue about what I was doing. Yet I’d still managed to create something that continued to benefit and serve girls all these years later. It was for girls like Danielle that I’d founded GEMS, when all I really had to offer in the beginning was compassion and love. I remembered how important that still was, even in the face of the overflowing dam. I decided to pick up a journal and some SpongeBob socks on the way to see Danielle. It would not solve the problem but it would make her smile, and for today, that would have to be enough.

Chapter 1
Learning

Child sexual exploitation is the most hidden form
of child abuse in the United States and North America today.
It is the nation’s least recognized epidemic.

—Dr. Richard J. Estes, University of Pennsylvania

FALL 1997, NEW YORK CITY

As soon as I step through the gates of Rikers Island, the air seems to change. If air can smell oppressed, thick and heavy with misery, this is pretty much it. I feel like I’m suffocating. Rikers is the world’s largest penal colony, encompassing its 413-acre island and housing over fourteen thousand inmates on any given day, and going there is not a trip to be taken lightly. Once that heavy door slams behind you, visitor’s pass or not, there’s a sinking sensation that you’ll never be able to leave. On all my visits, I slide my bag onto the X-ray machine, get yelled at by a guard for putting it on the wrong way/too soon/too late/something, try not to be bothered that even as a visitor I am treated like an inmate, and pray that I haven’t forgotten to take any change out of my pockets before I get humiliated by the guard again. Getting in, while I’m sure not quite as arduous as trying to actually get out of Rikers, is an ordeal in itself. Once inside, getting to the high school for the adolescent girls is even harder. While it is less than a two-minute walk from the inside gate to the school, you can potentially wait an hour for a “ride,” a guard to escort you, as is required for visitors. The general rule of thumb is that male guards will escort you, not female guards. In a women’s facility, female guards outnumber the male ones, so there is a lot of waiting quietly on the bench for someone to take pity on you and walk you a hundred-yard distance. Impatience gets you yelled at, as does requesting the front gate guard to assist you. So I shut up and wait.

I’d been coming to Rikers to do outreach for a few months and was getting used to the routine. At first, the walk through the jail had intimidated me. On my first day, a few leers from some of the women, curious stares, and a couple of mean looks had my heart pumping. My ideas about women’s prison came primarily from the Australian soap opera
Prisoner: Cell Block H
, a female version of
Oz
in which characters were disposed of weekly in all types of violent ways. Perhaps I’d be shanked; perhaps there’d be a riot and I’d be killed by COs by mistake. There were endless variations of the bloody-end-in-jail theme, but after my first presentation to a group of adults in the drug unit, the fear left and all that remained was sadness and a sense of hopelessness. Women in their thirties and forties stuck in a revolving door of addiction and jail, women in their sixties who should have been spending time with their grandchildren instead of facing yet another incarceration, women in their twenties who looked so much older, just starting out on their path already branded with a record. I quickly grew to have empathy for these women, understood that our lives could have been reversed, that it was a major miracle that I wasn’t stuck in the jail cycle myself. At one time, during my teenage years, I’d even considered going to prison a badge of honor, a way of proving myself. I’d taken the risks, hadn’t “grassed,” and had even been willing to take a multiple-year sentence for my bank robber boyfriend. It turned out, though, despite my loyalty and Bonnie and Clyde mentality, that the police had scant evidence on me and then had violated my rights as a juvenile, thereby ensuring that the charges were eventually dropped. My time in jail had ultimately amounted to a couple of overnights for theft and three days for the bank robbery conspiracy, and even that had been limited to being held in the bookings of our downtown local precinct. The older I’d gotten, the less jail had seemed like a good idea, until I simply stopped doing things that might’ve sent me there. Still, though I had no legitimate jail experience to speak of, I did know what addiction felt like, both to substances and men. I knew what it felt like to live on the edges of society, to feel hopeless and to be homeless. I understood confusing domestic violence with love and always having to hustle to make the next buck (or in my case, pound). Once I shared my story with the women, they’d shown me so much love that there was nothing left to be scared of. Now as I walked down the hallways, I’d see a few familiar faces who would greet me respectfully. “Hey, miss. You coming to see us today?”

“Nah, adolescents. Friday I’ll be there.”

“Good. Those little bitches need somebody to talk to. They hardheaded.”

I laughed. The older women were forever complaining about the teenagers, but even in the way they’d called them
little bitches
,
knuckleheads
,
them loose asses
, there was maternal concern and identification. They could see themselves at that age, remember what it was like to think they knew it all only to discover twenty years later that there was nothing cute about being in jail. Even when I would do street outreach at night, the older women would point me in the direction of a younger girl and say, “She’s a kid, she needs help. You should talk to
her.
”

Implicit in their admonishments to focus on the younger girls was the unspoken belief that it was too late for them, but that there was still hope for her/them/those little bitches
.
In fairness, too, I knew that while the women who knew my story both accepted and respected me on some level, I was still some fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old without a criminal record, without decades of substance abuse, without kids I’d lost to the system. I did my best not to come across as a know-it-all, a kid who’d gotten lucky and who was now, as my own grandmother used to say, “trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs.” Some of the women I worked with had daughters older than me; most had addictions older than me. So I understood why they pushed me toward the teenagers though inside I felt a little relieved, but also a little guilty, that I, too, felt more optimism and passion for the adolescents and young adults than perhaps I did for them.

That fall of 1997, the best-known British import to these teenagers is, sadly, the Spice Girls, who’ve just come out with their movie and yet another stuck-in-your-head song. With my long dark hair in a ponytail and my accent, according to the girls, I look “just like Sporty Spice, miss.” I’m not thrilled about being compared to the Spice Girl I think is the most awkward-looking, but after my initial horror, I see it as a workable hook. The girls are excited about this tenuous connection to a pop group, so I play it up and do my best British accent. “Say
blah, blah girl power
. Pleeeeeeease, miss.” There’s a chorus of plaintive “please”s and “yeah, do it”s, so I oblige the fans, giving the peace sign as I’ve seen on the group’s ubiquitous commercials. The crowd goes wild. “Do it again, do it again.” Although we started out with a group of just three or four girls, they’re now calling their friends, “Ay yo, come listen to the lady that talks like a Spice Girl.” Just another day at Rikers Island High School for Girls. One of the most notorious and largest jails in the country, and here I am Spice Girling it up, using my accent to the max. I had just started coming to the high school and had run a couple of small groups with some girls who’d been identified by the social worker as “really needing to talk to you,” plus a few individual sessions. That day I am doing a presentation for all the girls and the teaching staff and I’m nervous. The girls are loud and raucous, nothing like the boot-camp-trained adult women who lockstep in single file, sit quietly, and apparently recite the Serenity Prayer at every opportunity. These high school adolescents are sixteen to twenty-one and are charged with everything from shoplifting to murder although most, I’ll learn, are in for some type of drug charge, invariably holding for, copping for, or trafficking for a man or a boy who has escaped prosecution and is now suddenly too busy to visit or send commissary money. The classroom is packed, standing room only, and now, after a few months of speaking to the adult women, I’ve gotten more comfortable at telling my story. Over the years I’ll learn to edit out more and more to preserve my own sanity and to avoid some of the offensive and often stupid questions that will inevitably come up. But these are the early days, so after I’ve told my story in much of its raw and painful detail, the stupid questions come and, interestingly, none of them are from the girls. I try to deflect a few of the more offensive remarks coming from the teachers, and mercifully the girls jump in to save me from more embarrassment, with sincere, thoughtful questions and comments. The whole group is quiet and subdued; a few girls are sniffling, trying to be unobtrusive with their tears.

“Miss, do you and your moms get along now? Cos me and my moms is still beefing cos she getting high again.”

“Yo, did you ever hear from your pimp again? Is he sorry?”

I answer the questions as honestly and carefully as I can and as I do, the girls begin to share their own stories, their own pain. The teachers are quiet.

“I got abused, miss, when I was little and now I just be so fuckin angry at men and I can’t help it.”

“I’ve been in foster care since I was five and my family knows I’m locked up and they don’t even visit.”

“My boyfriend tried to shoot me and I grabbed the gun and now I’m here cos I shot him by accident. But he was beating me every day and I was scared of him. I don’t understand why they didn’t lock him up before this all happened. I didn’t mean to kill him, I just wanted him to stop.”

Girls are crying as they speak. The girls sitting next to them cry, too; their backs are rubbed, some compassionately, some awkwardly. Soon most everyone in the room is crying. I’m wiping away tears, too, as the group continues. Teachers drift out quietly and yet the girls don’t want to move. Something’s happening in the room that was unforeseeable an hour ago when the rowdy, boisterous group had sauntered their way in pushing, cursing, cracking on each other. The room has let down its guard, without the defenses, the anger, the front that has been carefully erected often for years prior to their incarceration, if not hastily built as soon as they hit the island. “Weakness” is not accepted in an adult correctional facility, despite the fact that most of these girls are not even of the age of majority and should be experiencing high school in a very different environment. Yet here we sit together listening, allowing each other to share raw emotions, to be scared, to be hurt, to be girls just for a few minutes. Even in my naïveté, I’m clear that once we leave this room their defensive fronts have to return, which is perhaps why they seem so reluctant to leave.

A girl with a scarf covering her mousy hair and pockmarked skin who’s been sitting near the front, tears streaming, finally speaks.

“I’ve been in the life too—I was on heroin, and I had a man who was pimping me out to everyone to buy drugs. I can relate to what you were saying about nearly dying cos I nearly died too. They tied me up in a bathtub and stabbed me in the head with a screwdriver.”

She leans forward and pulls her hair back. The wounds are horrific—fresh and red; her whole head is littered with lumps of raw flesh and there’s a collective gasp from the rest of the group.

“I thought I was going to die, but somehow I lived and managed to get out. And now I feel like you came here for a reason to tell me that I was supposed to live. I never heard no one talk about this stuff, about the stuff you did, that I did.” She chokes up. “I’m glad you came.”

The room murmurs assent and I’m choking up, too.

A petite Latina with long black curls, who’s been the most silent and reserved of the whole group, finally speaks up and looks directly at me. “She’s right, you was sent here, miss, for us. God sent you. Everyone else, the counselors and stuff, they can be nice, but they had a luv-luv life. You feel me? A luv-luv life, they read about the shit we went through in some book—that’s good ’n’ all but you lived this shit. It’s different, your life was like ours, some the same, some different but you been there, you feel me? And look, you came all the way from a whole nother country to here. To New York, to Rikers! That’s kinda crazy, if you think about it, you feel me? So that’s why I know. God sent you. To us. To help us be strong. To let us know we not alone and we can be all right too.” She finishes her pronouncement and sits back in her original spot against the wall.