Girls Like Us (6 page)

Despite the relative ease that I feel wandering around, even at night, in my newfound community, it’s clear that this is definitely not Europe. The crime, the poverty, the violence are worse. The population of all of England is around fifty million; New York City alone is home to eight million people. I’d seen, and experienced, my fair share of violence, but the weapon of choice in England, due to our restrictive gun laws, was a knife or a broken bottle, generally with the sole intent to maim the person’s face. Even most of the police in England carried only nightsticks. In America, the prevalence of guns, both civilian and law enforcement, upped the ante. The week I arrive in New York, Abner Louima is attacked and brutalized by members of the New York City Police Department. A couple of months later a thirteen-year-old girl shoots a cabdriver in the face, relaunching the debates about super-predators and kids that kill. My natural and often unwise sense of invincibility is shaken a little as I read story after story in the news, see makeshift memorials with votive candles on corners throughout my neighborhood, and hear sirens so frequently that they begin to be just background noise.

Even the drug culture is different in America. I had had firsthand experience with crack cocaine, having been introduced to it by my “boyfriend.” Yet crack in Europe in the early nineties was still perceived as just another drug, like speed or Ecstasy. Not only hadn’t it reached epidemic status in Europe, in the early nineties crack was still considered something of a novelty, just a quicker way to do coke, yet I’d learned quickly that the addictive properties of crack were much more potent than anything else I’d ever tried. When I come to New York in 1997, it’s at the end of the crack era, although the effects are still visible in the city, in the hollowed-out addicts striding up the block with the unmistakable gait of someone on a mission, in the disrepair of many communities, in the stories of the girls that I am meeting. I find that there is a common belief from people asking about my work, that sexually exploited girls
must
be drug addicted, and it is the addiction that fuels the exploitation. Yet even in the initial years, and in over a decade that has followed, I’ve found very few girls who are addicted to “hard” drugs and for whom the addiction came prior to the exploitation. To see not just community members but sometimes family members so strung out, so desperate, so scorned does not induce many young people to try a drug with such visibly horrifying effects, and with such a strong stigma attached. Girls weren’t drug addicted, they were love addicted, and that, I’ll learn, is far harder to treat.

As I do counseling and outreach in Rikers, on the streets, and in homeless shelters for the missionary project, I realize that the girls and young women in their early to late teens that I’m working with are indeed children of the crack era. Born in 1984, 1981, 1980, these are the children who’ve come of age throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as the crack hurricane tore through already struggling communities, ravaged mothers and their families, and left countless orphaned—literally and emotionally—children in its wake. These are the children, whether or not their parents were actually substance abusers, who watched their families rip apart, their neighborhoods disintegrate, who stepped over crack vials on the way to school, mourned the violent death of a brother, a cousin, a friend.

I realize, too, how much the crack epidemic disproportionately affected communities of color. One study on the effects of crack notes, “Between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate for black males aged fourteen to seventeen more than doubled, and the homicide rate for black males aged eighteen to twenty-four increased nearly as much. During this period, the black community also experienced an increase in fetal death rates, low-birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.” During this period, the AIDS crisis also began to hit communities. Children were left orphaned by a disease that no one understood and everyone feared. Children who were infected were often not adopted or taken in by extended family members, due to the pervasive stigma about how HIV was contracted, and they too began to flood the foster care system.

The impact of the crack epidemic and initial AIDS surge on family structures in New York City cannot be overestimated. In 1984, there were 16,230 children in foster care in New York City; by 1992, that number had swelled to over 49,000, overwhelming the already fractured system. These children were primarily black and Latino.

I think about my own parents’ substance abuse and the devastating impact that it had on me, and then I listen to girls talk about relative after relative whose lives had been turned upside down. In the thirteen years that have passed since I first began to meet with sexually exploited girls, the ripple effects, not just in New York, but in urban areas throughout the country, still have a far-reaching impact that cannot be measured in decreased crime stats or fewer vials on the street. The streets have gotten cleaner and safer and New York is rated one of the safest big cities in America. The murder rate in 2007 is at 494, down from a high of 2,245 in 1990. Spanish Harlem is now called, unbelievably, SpaHa, and the South Bronx is SoBro, at least in the real estate pages of the
New York Times
. Brooklyn has become the borough of choice for hipsters and developers. In Harlem, 125th Street boasts two Starbucks, an H&M, and a Marshalls. Luxury condos are everywhere, there’s a brand-new stadium for the Yankees, and yet there are still two New Yorks. Just as the gutted, abandoned buildings dotted throughout certain neighborhoods testify to the years when tourists were afraid to visit, and point to the poverty that still dominates many communities, the multigenerational impact of the crack epidemic continues to reverberate in the lives of abandoned and traumatized children.

While the crack epidemic has economically damaged many communities, the larger social and governmental policy decisions have been far more destructive. Of course many children who grow up in challenging economic situations thrive, but the reality is that far too many don’t, and too many children’s futures can be determined by zip code. Children in poor neighborhoods frequently receive a substandard education, are often exposed to lead paint in poorly constructed buildings, have higher rates of asthma, and live in communities where there are little to no recreational or green spaces and where entire neighborhoods have been abandoned and forgotten by those in power. Children born into poverty are at risk for many things, including being recruited into the commercial sex industry.

Nationally, over thirteen million children live below the poverty line. Over half a million children in New York City live in poverty, concentrated in some of the most economically depressed communities, where most of the tracks, unsurprisingly, are located: Hunts Point in the Bronx, East New York in Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway in Queens. Raising children, particularly girls, in areas where there’s an existing sex industry, where johns are still driving around in the early mornings as children go to school, where pimps buy gifts for preteen girls with the intention of grooming and priming them, can be a constant struggle between the home that you try to create and the world outside your door.

For children separated from their families, the risk for commercial sexual exploitation increases. There are currently over 15,000 children in the foster care system in New York City, and a 2007 study shows that 75 percent of sexually exploited and trafficked children in NYC were in foster care at some point in their lives. When children who have witnessed or experienced abuse and neglect are removed from their families, they often bounce from placement to placement, perhaps experiencing fresh abuse from a new family. When you grow up three blocks away from a track, go to school in overcrowded, underresourced classrooms, and see violence in your community, it’s hard to feel as though you have other options.

FALL 1989, ENGLAND

The van leaves at 5 a.m. to get us to the Estée Lauder factory for our 7 a.m. shift. It’s still dark outside and it’s too early for me to engage in the chatter of the other girls in the van. I sit smoking and staring out the window thinking how much I hate this job. Still, it’s something, and it’s helping pay the bills at home, stave off the foreclosure, and keep me stocked in cigarettes and weed, and those are the critical things right now. The social workers have stopped coming to visit, the school has stopped calling. No one seems to notice or care that I’m not in school or that I’m working full-time at fourteen. I’m working through the temp agency as a seventeen-year-old named Rose Johnson, after my great-aunt; the job before that was as Bailey Johnson, after the singer Pearl Bailey; the next place I think I’ll be Cyd Johnson after Cyd Charisse. I can work for only a few months at each place before they start catching on that the National Insurance number I gave them doesn’t match with my name, which is also made up, and begin to ask too many questions for which I don’t have any answers. I’m a few years off from being able to work legally so I’ve been bouncing from temp agency to temp agency, having figured out that they’ll pay you through their own books for the first two months while they’re waiting for your National Insurance card, which in my case will never arrive. One temp agency won’t pay me for a month so I spend four weeks walking five miles one way, doing a twelve-hour shift, and walking five miles back.

Most of the girls that I hang out with are “Estée Lauder girls.” It’s a badge of honor to work at Estée Lauder as it’s considered one of the more posh factories. It’s also a lifer factory, with mostly women and a few men who have been there for fifteen, twenty years. In an industrial city like Portsmouth with unemployment rates, school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancy rates, and crime rates that are all higher than the national average, getting a secure job is a victory. The lifers look down on those of us who are temps, treating us with disdain. Girls who show real respect for the work fare better. I, on the other hand, make no secret of the fact that I believe I can do more than this. The women there make me sad. They all look so much older than they are, and whatever dreams they might have had have been drained out of them by the monotony of sitting next to a conveyor belt for years. The older women look at me with a mixture of scorn and regret.

I’m under no illusions, though, that I’ll ever get hired on permanently. I’m forever in trouble. Talking too much. Getting up and leaving the line. Not being quick enough. I loathe the sit-down jobs that require real dexterity. I am, as my grandmother says, cack-handed, and therefore screwing the cap on hundreds of bottles of Red Hot nail polish in twenty minutes is beyond me. I prefer the end of the line, boxing and packing, loading up the pallets, working up a sweat. There I can move around and talk freely. The line manager calls me “Darky,” as in “Darky, get this box,” or “Tell the darky that she has lunch break now.” I know I’d have a good case were I to sue them for racial discrimination, but I’m already working illegally and don’t want to rock the boat. So I save my indignation and spend my shifts daydreaming about ways to get out.

Other than the “free” samples that somehow wind up in my pocket at the end of the day, and the factory discount store where I stock up on so much Beautiful and Youth Dew that I gift everyone I know with it for three Christmases in a row, I really hate Estée Lauder. I hate the potpourri factory next, although there I’m able to pick up some Christmas shoplifting orders; and then hate the aircraft parts factory; the IBM factory, where we have to wear cover-ups that look like biohazard suits; the tampon factory, where no one ever wants to admit they work; and the Johnson & Johnson factory, where I can never shake the smell of baby shampoo from my skin. As the months pass, I see myself becoming one of the women that I pity. Getting up, going to an awful, mind-numbing job, coming home, voluntarily numbing my mind with weed and alcohol, going to sleep, doing it all over again the next day.

I cannot share my friends’ enthusiasm for this life, no matter how hard I try. I feel destined for something more, although having dropped out of school, I’m aware that my options are limited. The pressure to have a baby, at fourteen, already feels intense. The desire to create a family, to have someone who will love me, is overwhelming at times. All of my friends are older than me, although still mostly teenagers, and I’m one of the few that hasn’t already had at least one child. Having a baby, getting a council flat, working and living and dying here, feels like the most obtainable goal.

When someone suggests that I should try modeling, I jump at the chance. I trek up to London to visit agencies and manage to get signed. All the other girls have their pushy stage mothers with them. I’m always alone and have a hard time being pushy, but still I manage to get a little work for some teen magazines that gives me a level of celebrity status in our town, and also gets me jumped by several groups of jealous girls. I will myself to grow the requisite five additional inches needed to sign with a better agency but I stay short. Still, I see modeling as my only ticket out of a town that can offer me nothing but the hopeless future I see in everyone around me. When photographers ask me to pose more “seductively,” to slip my shirt off, to do some “artistic” nude shots for a calendar that I know will end up on some car mechanic’s garage wall, I comply. Anything that’ll get me out. Anything that will make me feel less invisible.

While there are clear systemic and social issues that leave children vulnerable, the recognition of this reality presents a constant challenge in advocating for exploited girls. In describing the poverty and the abuse that girls experience prior to their commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, the response too often is that these girls inevitably aren’t really going to have great lives anyway. I remember arguing fiercely one day with a lawyer who was representing a thirteen-year-old who’d been charged with a serious crime that her thirty-five-year-old “boyfriend” had committed. I wanted him to fight for her to be charged as a juvenile so that her record would eventually be sealed. Snorting with laughter, he said, “It’s not as if she’s going to be a brain surgeon, so does it really matter?” It appears that if you’re already considered damaged goods, or doomed to a life of poverty, then being further victimized is not quite as bad.