Girls Like Us Read online

  RACHEL LLOYD

  GIRLS

  LIKE

  US

  Fighting for a World Where

  Girls Are Not for Sale,

  an Activist Finds Her Calling

  and Heals Herself

  For Falicia and Adam. I miss you both.

  To all the GEMS girls and young women,

  past and present, who all hold a place in my heart.

  I love you more than you will ever know.

  And to all the girls like us.

  Hang on to the world as it spins around.

  Just don’t let the spin get you down.

  Things are moving fast.

  Hold on tight and you will last.

  Keep your self-respect, your manly pride.

  Get yourself in gear.

  Keep your stride.

  Never mind your fears.

  Brighter days will soon be here.

  Take it from me, someday we’ll all be free.

  Keep on walking tall, hold your head up high.

  Lay your dreams right up to the sky.

  Sing your greatest song.

  And you’ll keep going, going on.

  Just wait and see, someday we’ll all be free.

  Take it from me, someday we’ll all be free.

  —DONNY HATHAWAY AND EDWARD HOWARD,“Someday We’ll All Be Free”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 : Learning

  Chapter 2 : Risk

  Chapter 3 : Family

  Chapter 4 : Recruitment

  Chapter 5 : Pimps

  Chapter 6 : Johns

  Chapter 7 : Victims

  Chapter 8 : Cops

  Chapter 9 : Staying

  Chapter 10 : Leaving

  Chapter 11 : Relapse

  Chapter 12 : Unlearning

  Chapter 13 : Stigma

  Chapter 14 : Healing

  Chapter 15 : Leadership

  Chapter 16 : Beginnings

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Credits

  About the Author

  Additional Praise for GIRLS LIKE US

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  She likes swimming, SpongeBob, Mexican food, writing poetry, getting her nails painted (light pink is her favorite color), and Harry Potter books (plus she thinks Daniel Radcliffe is “fine”). This Christmas, she really wants an iPod but would settle for some sweat suits, preferably pink. Sometimes she’s petulant—pouting and sullen—but mostly she’s open and eager to be loved. When she smiles, huge dimples crease her chubby face and are still capable, as she moves into awkward adolescence, of melting hearts. She’s much like any other eleven-year-old girl in America, except for one critical difference. Over the last year of her life, she’s been trafficked up and down the East Coast by a twenty-nine-year-old pimp and sold nightly on Craigslist to adult men who ignore her dimples and her baby fat and purchase her for sex.

  It’s late on a Friday night and I’m still in the office. As the executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS)—the organization I founded to help girls and young women who have been recruited and trafficked into the commercial sex industry—I have a lot of late nights at the office. During the day, the office functions as a drop-in center, filled with teenage girls who are meeting with their case managers, coming for poetry or cooking or a boxing group, using the computers, or simply hanging out on our old and overused couch. It’s frequently noisy; someone always needs something and while I love the energy of the space that we’ve created, it can be tough to get much paperwork done in this environment. After-hours, when all the girls and staff have left, is often my time to finish writing that grant that’s overdue or respond to the never-ending stream of e-mails that I can never seem to stay on top of. Tonight, though, I have no plans to be here till the wee hours; I’ve promised myself that I’m leaving in ten minutes. The Soup is on and I have a new InStyle magazine to read. After a long day and a long week, it’s a perfect Friday night plan.

  When the office phone starts ringing, I’m almost tempted to ignore it and run out the door, but instead find myself answering and agreeing to a request to come to a foster care agency to meet a fourteen-year-old who’s just been picked up off the streets. Since we’re the only nonprofit in New York State designed to serve commercially sexually exploited girls, calls like these are common. Tonight the on-call staff is already at home in Brooklyn, so I figure it’s easier and quicker for me to just grab a cab downtown, do a quick assessment, try to make the girl feel safe and comfortable, and then transfer the case on Monday to one of my staff members. I figure I can still make it home in time for The Soup’s 1 a.m. rerun and my weekly date with Joel McHale.

  Ten minutes after arriving at the agency, though, I’m grouchy and wishing I actually had let the phone ring; the security guard gives me a hard time about getting into the building and the two staff workers on duty act as if I’m invisible. I’m deposited on a bench in the hallway by another staff person who then disappears for almost an hour, time well spent writing furious e-mails in my head to the agency’s supervisor detailing what constitutes an emergency call on a Friday night and what doesn’t.

  I’m struck as always by the sterile, clinical atmosphere of the agency. This newly renovated center had been unveiled with much fanfare from the city. In fairness, it stands in stark contrast to the prior building, which had been Dickensian in its disrepair, yet I can’t help feeling that they’ve really missed the boat with this new facility. Though it is clean, the harsh fluorescent lights and pale green walls, with the long hallways decorated with nothing more than a few child abuse hotline posters, don’t really add up to a warm feeling. I couldn’t imagine being a child who was brought here (actually, I could and that was worse). If you ended up here, it was likely after repeated abuse or neglect. You would probably just have been removed from your home, a terrifying experience even if you did feel lucky to escape. Now you were in unfamiliar territory, with strangers, in one of the most child unfriendly spaces in the city. I guess this thought had occurred to people other than me, because at least the living areas for the infants and toddlers had a wall mural and some brightly colored plastic furniture. Someone must have figured that the older kids didn’t need color or a semblance of warmth, as the only thing that decorated the walls of the girls’ unit were some pictures ripped out from Essence and Honey magazines. Clearly one of the staff had tried, but the effort is almost comical: a few magazine pictures, curled at the edges, of happy black women and girls, fashionable and beautiful, eating, laughing, celebrating life. I guess that a concerned woman of color who worked there desperately wanted the children of color, the overwhelming majority, who came through the doors to see images that looked like them in vastly different circumstances. Yet the sparseness of the unit in contrast with the staged, golden-lit happiness of the models makes their picture-perfect lives seem all the more unachievable and remote. I decide to once again offer my five decorating cents (warmer, brighter paint; colorful pictures; curtains; lamps; throw pillows) to the director before I leave.

  I sit there redecorating in my mind, alternating between frustration (with waiting so bloody long) and sadness (that there even needs to be a place where kids can go when they can’t live at home), when finally two staff workers appear flanking a child, I presume the Danielle I’ve been told about, who is obviously fresh from a shower. Her wet black hair is swept back into a ponytail framing a very pretty, slightly chubby, but extremely pissed-off-looking face. I’d been informed that the clothes Danielle had been wearing when she was brought in were considered “inappropriate,” so her new attire consists of a plus-size
shapeless black pantsuit, the type favored by larger women in their sixties and probably purchased at Walmart or Talbots. The outfit swamps her short frame, her hands hidden in the sleeves, the pants bagged around her ankles, creating a bizarre Aladdin look that is enhanced by an incongruous pair of black open-toed heels. Despite encouragement from the staff to put on socks and slippers, she has vehemently refused to let go of her shoes and clatters down the hallway with the familiar gait of a girl whose feet are killing her.

  The staff members introduce me to Danielle as “someone who wants to talk to you,” which unsurprisingly is met with a completely disinterested look from her, and then leave us alone in the interview room. Given the staff’s bored and vague introduction, I figure I’ll give it another go.

  “Hey, my name’s Rachel and I’m from a program called GEMS that works with teenage girls who’ve been in the life, and I’m just here to see how we can support and help you. I know you’ve had a pretty rough day, how are you doing tonight?”

  Pause. Silence. Danielle sits eyeing me warily, with her arms folded tightly across her chest.

  “Guess they didn’t tell you I was coming, huh?” I roll my eyes at the door. Cheap trick, bond against the system when all else fails. Silence.

  “I’m just here to talk to you a little bit and see if there’s anything we can do. I’m not from the cops or child welfare or anything like that. What you tell me will be confidential.”

  Silence. If she is at all relieved that I’m not a cop, she doesn’t show it.

  “You know, the reason I started GEMS is cos I used to be in the life, too, so I wanted to have a place for girls who’d been through the same thing.”

  Silence. That admission normally at least provoked a question: “Really, miss? How old was you?” “What track you worked?” “You had a daddy?” But nothing, not even a raised eyebrow or a show of interest.

  “Can you tell me what brought you here today?”

  Silence. This is a little tougher than I’d expected or, to be honest, wanted, particularly at the end of a long week. A lot of girls I encountered in these situations started chatting right away and it was harder getting them to be quiet.

  “So I know that your name’s Danielle. Can I ask how old you are?”

  I’d already been told over the phone by the intake worker that she is fourteen and it is a close-ended question (bad move in the counseling process), but I’m not really getting anywhere so I figure that this will at least get her to respond.

  She breaks her silence. “Eleven.”

  I’m so mentally prepared for a different answer that it takes a moment to register.

  Double take.

  “I’m sorry, how old?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Really?” I say, with far too much incredulity in my voice, and, I’m sure, on my face. Wow . . . dumb response.

  She looks at me like I’m a little dense and just nods.

  I wonder if perhaps she is lying. Lots of girls lied about their age in order to be older but I’d never met anyone who’d lied to be younger. While it probably isn’t hard to believe that one of the staff had erroneous information, I really don’t want to believe what she is telling me. Fourteen was bad enough, but eleven?

  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-shape
d 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.