Girls Like Us Read online

  We pull into a small village, and Mike starts talking about where we will live after the wedding. I try to play along as much as I can but I’m plotting my escape. I’ve managed to get him to give back my passport but he’s still holding on to the money. As soon as the car slows down, I jump out, stumbling and then running as fast as I can in the opposite direction. An elderly woman is walking by and I shout, “Polezie—vo es Polezie?” She points up the street, fortunately in the direction I’m already headed, and I run faster. Mike is trying to turn the car around to catch me but there’s too much traffic and he’s still trying to make a U-turn when I’m already halfway up the hill.

  I run, out of breath and wheezing, into the precinct. I tell the officer at the front desk in English (as I don’t know the words in German) that I was kidnapped and assaulted. He calls several other officers over. I describe Mike and his car and tell them he should still be in the area. There’s some discussion among the officers that I don’t understand and then a Sergeant Werner takes me into an interview room. He’s tall and a little intimidating but I figure once I tell him what happened he’ll warm up. I tell him the whole story, although my disheveled appearance, the bruises that are beginning to develop on my face and arms, and the torn soles of my feet pretty much explain everything. Sergeant Werner seems mildly interested, although he’s clearly not the most empathetic of listeners. He asks questions and writes notes until we’ve been all the way through the event.

  Another cop comes in to report that Mike has been brought into custody and is in the interview room next to mine. I tell Sergeant Werner to check Mike’s pockets and that he’ll find two thousand-mark bills, one five hundred, three hundreds, and four fifty-mark notes.

  Sergeant Werner is gone for a while, and I can hear the low murmur of men’s voices in the next room. Then I hear them laughing, and moments later the cop reenters the room and casually asks me if Mike can have a cigarette. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “A fuckin cigarette? He just beat and threatened to kill me. Tell him to buy his own fuckin pack with the three thousand marks he just stole from me!” I’m yelling now, with tears streaming down my face, and yet the sergeant just stares at me as if I’ve just refused the most reasonable, logical request in the world. “Fuck this. I’m leaving. You’re not gonna do shit.”

  I storm out of the interview room, still crying.

  Werner runs after me and for a moment I think he’s going to apologize, arrest Mike, and this whole bizarre scenario is going to be resolved the way it should be. Instead, he grabs my arm, tells me I can’t leave, and demands my passport. I can’t believe this is happening. I’m yelling and crying and trying to get away from him. “I didn’t do anything, he’s the one that did this to me.” The cop is now blocking me from leaving as I try to walk down the stairs. I know that Mike can probably hear the whole thing and is enjoying every second. Fortunately, another cop—a woman, hears the commotion, too, and runs up the stairs. They are debating in German and I can understand only a few words, but it’s clear that he’s winning.

  The female officer turns to me. She looks frustrated but is trying to calm me down. “Give him your passport or he’ll arrest you.”

  The male cop looks smug.

  With tears streaming from anger more than anything else, I turn over my passport, still confused as to why I’m being treated this way. She takes me downstairs to another interview room where I sit chain-smoking for what feels like hours, but is probably closer to forty-five minutes.

  Sergeant Werner finally returns and hands me back my passport. The female officer is with him and offers an apology. Werner seems disappointed that he was unable to find any outstanding warrants and has no reason to arrest me.

  “You can leave.” He dismisses me with a wave.

  “How am I supposed to get home?” We had driven for over two hours and I had no idea where I was.

  “He will give you a ride.”

  I’m confused. “Who? Another officer?” I know I don’t want to be trapped in a car with this guy for a couple of hours.

  “Him.” He points upstairs, and I suddenly realize that he is suggesting that I get back into the car with the same man who kidnapped and assaulted me that morning.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Now I am about to get arrested.

  “He says he will give you a ride. He is leaving now too.”

  “You’re not arresting him? What about the assault? What about my money? Did you get it back?”

  “He says it’s his.” Werner is already walking out the door, no longer interested in our conversation.

  The female officer who has stayed puts her arm around me. In careful English and over my sobs, she explains what is going on. Yes, Mike is claiming the money is his. The bruises and cuts, the marks on my body and on my feet apparently come from the fact that I like rough sex, and that’s what we were doing in the field. In fact, he was trying to break up with me but I didn’t want to and that’s why I came to the precinct. He’s told them that I am a “Hure,” and that my place of employment is a strip club. With these “facts” on the table, my case has ceased to be a case.

  The woman seems ashamed. “They do this to many girls,” she says. “Girls . . . uh . . . rape.” She mimes hitting. “Girls . . . they, ah . . . do not believe, um, when cabaret, das bordell, strip club.” She struggles to explain, but she really doesn’t need to. She gives me enough money to get on the train and writes Werner’s name and badge number on a piece of paper with an address for what I assume is police headquarters. “Please. Write to them. Tell them what he did. He always do this.” There are tears in her eyes and I cry as I hug her, thanking her over and over again. Of course, Mike is waiting for me when I get off the train. He’s smug now and I don’t argue with him. He won. I figure that the bruises will heal and I’ll make back the three grand eventually.

  Later when JP begins to hit me, night after night, I’ll know better than to go to the cops for help. I never do write the letter of complaint about Werner. I don’t believe it’ll do any good. After all, I’m not exactly a credible complainant, an upstanding citizen. Girls like me, I realize, get what they deserve.

  I was thirteen when the film The Accused premiered in England. Based on the real-life gang rape of Cheryl Araujo that occurred at Big Dan’s bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1983, this film was one of the first Hollywood films to deal with rape in a direct manner. Jodie Foster plays the rape victim and in the end triumphs over the perpetrators of the crime and the system. In real life, however, the victim was vilified by her Portuguese community despite having been assaulted by six men on a pool table while a group of bystanders cheered them on. Candlelight vigils were held on behalf of the accused men and the victim was portrayed as a loose woman whose decision to go to a local bar alone late at night to buy a pack of cigarettes got her just what she deserved.

  A few months later, as a victim of a date rape, I was told by the cops that given that I already worked in a bar, was on a date with a man in his twenties, and was generally considered to be “too grown” made for a difficult case. Despite the fact that the assault took my virginity and that the adult perpetrator had a record of sexual and physical violence, including putting a teenage girl in a coma, the case was dropped. Apparently I wasn’t a great victim then either.

  My experiences with cops, both growing up in England and in Germany, left me distrustful and skeptical. When I came to New York and began working with law enforcement, I retained a lot of the perceptions that I’d carried for years. As I worked with cops, I’d hear the same complaints: The girls didn’t want to talk to them, the girls were “resistant” to help, that perhaps they didn’t really want any. Most law enforcement officers failed to understand the rationale behind the girls’ responses to them. They sometimes understood why internationally trafficked victims who are undocumented and who’ve often experienced police corruption in other countries might be mistrustful of the police, but they expected girls from the United
States to automatically trust and respect law enforcement. Yet many trafficked girls have grown up in communities that historically have feared and loathed the police, often with good reason. Communities of color and low-socioeconomic communities have rarely experienced police presence as a positive thing. Growing up in these communities, you learn that snitches get stitches and that cooperating with the cops is considered the lowest form of cowardice. In fact, cops are the ones you’ve seen regularly harassing your brother when he’s late coming home, the ones who locked up your cousin last year, who took over an hour to come that time someone broke into your grandma’s apartment. You learn not to trust them and often to fear them.

  On the streets, it’s even harder to tell the good and bad guys apart. Cops see men buying girls on the street and look the other way, cops taunt girls and call them names, and some of the johns are cops themselves. The overwhelming majority of girls I’ve worked with have reported being threatened with jail if they refused sex with a cop, and some girls who refused and were arrested were forced to have sex at the precinct anyway. Some cops would take money from the girls when they spotted them on the streets, knowing that they could never report it. In 2008, a New York City detective was arrested and charged with pimping a thirteen-year-old girl whom he had lured, drugged, and threatened with violence.

  To be fair, these officers don’t represent every police officer. Most cops are apathetic toward the girls, not abusive. Yet, like the johns who wouldn’t dream of having sex with just “any” teenage girls, most of the cops who do use their power and position to abuse girls in the sex industry would never threaten a female drunk driver with arrest in exchange for sex. The fact that girls are “already out there” makes them less of a victim, less deserving of rights or boundaries.

  Girls who are raped and assaulted by johns or pimps know that their abuse will not be taken seriously. The rape of a prostituted girl or woman is considered by many to be a contradiction in terms and the police normally believe that what girls claim to be rape is really just a question of not getting paid for their services. In fact, many cops literally call it “theft of services.” How can someone be raped when they’re already having sex anyway? What we’ve learned in the sexual violence movement over the years is that rape has little to do with sex, and everything to do with power. Being raped feels just as scary if you’re a girl on the track who’s been sold to seven men that same night as it does to a “regular” woman or girl. If you’re considered sexually experienced, or even sexually active, the degrees of harm done by sexual assault are often measured out according to your level of “culpability.” While this view isn’t limited to girls in the sex industry and is also often imputed to victims of sexual violence who are considered promiscuous, women and girls in the sex industry are obviously seen as the least affected by sexual violence.

  Working with the girls at GEMS over the years, I found that this theme continually emerged. In case after case, I saw that girls weren’t being taken seriously, that their experiences of victimization were often disparaged at best and blatantly mocked at worst. In defending a sixteen-year-old rape victim, I was threatened with arrest. A cop told a girl he really couldn’t see why she didn’t just leave the man who had forcibly kidnapped her. A girl from Spain who got recruited in the United States and spoke very little English was told that because she hadn’t used the word “force” in reporting her rape at the hospital, the police, who did not speak Spanish, could not charge the perpetrator. Another girl’s body lay misidentified in a morgue for over a month while her family, having been brushed off by the police, frantically searched for her.

  It’s difficult to view yourself as a victim, no matter what happens to you, when your pimp, the men who buy you, and even those who are supposed to protect you see you as incapable of being victimized. Prostitution is viewed as a victimless crime, a statement that denies the humanity or victimhood of the women and girls involved. Women in the sex industry, and therefore trafficked and sexually exploited girls, are not believed to be capable of being hurt or raped. In fact, rather than being seen as victims, they’re seen as willing participants in their own abuse and are often perceived as having “asked for it.”

  I meet Krystal in the hallway of the Brooklyn Supreme Court. She’s late. Two police officers have driven her from a chain hotel upstate that the district attorney’s office has paid for. She looks like she’s barely slept, which I soon discover is an accurate assessment. Her hair is askew and despite my lectures on what to wear to court, she obviously just grabbed the nearest thing to her. Unfortunately, the outfit that she’s picked is a denim mini-miniskirt, construction Timbs with no socks, and a tight-fitting, wrinkled T-shirt. I’m taking a wild guess that this is the outfit she wore till the wee hours. It’s not exactly court attire and definitely not the outfit that we’d agreed on. Krystal’s long, long legs make the skirt, which is short, look even shorter. I’m horrified. Today is a huge day; she’s testifying in the trial of her ex-pimp and I’m already nervous about how she’ll be perceived by the jury. I drag her into the bathroom, before anyone else in the court corridors sees her, and try not to yell at her about her fashion choices on one of the most important days of her life. She tells me she thinks she looks OK. I try to explain that there’s OK for going to the bodega and OK for going to court, but we’ve already been down that road before and clearly it had little effect. I know she’s nervous and I don’t want to make it worse, but there’s no way I’m letting her walk into court like that. I’m already worried about how well she’ll do in her testimony: She’s scared, and when she gets scared, she gets sullen. A pouting and sullen “former child prostitute” in a skirt short enough to be a belt is unlikely to win any supporters on the jury, and I’m guessing she won’t impress the judge, either.

  I size her up. “What?” she whines. Despite the fact she’s got six inches on me in height, most of it in those legs, I know we’re about the same size. When we were trying to get her out of New York for her safety, she’d stayed at my house for a few days and, as the girls liked to call it, “gone shopping” in my closet. I look at myself in the mirror. Damn, I was kind of feeling my outfit today. It’s new and I look all pastel and preppy.

  Ten minutes later, she walks into court wearing a mint green linen dress from H&M, low white heels, and a white cotton cardigan from JCPenney. I walk into court wearing a teeny-tiny denim skirt, Timbs with no socks, and a tight-fitting, wrinkled T-shirt. I hold my bag in front of my legs to try to hide how ridiculous I look, but it doesn’t really help. The assistant district attorney, whom I’d seen earlier this morning, does a double take and raises his eyebrows. I shrug, whaddya-gonna-do style, but I’m fairly mortified and also extremely cold as my bare thighs hit the wooden bench. Mainly for Krystal’s sake, but a tiny bit for mine, I pray that her testimony will be brief.

  As it turns out, Krystal’s preppy outfit doesn’t even matter. She’s rightfully nervous and is clearly thrown off by the sight of her pimp, Pretty Boy, in the courtroom. He knows it and stares intently at her the whole time, breaking eye contact only to scribble furiously on his pad after she answers a question. Adding to the intimidation are the glares of some of his family members, who take turns staring at her, at me, and at her case manager, the only people there for Krystal. I’d instructed her to look only at us, but her gaze seems inescapably pulled in his direction. Three years since the last time she saw him and he still wields control over her.

  The direct examination from the ADA, who clearly hasn’t prepped her properly, is terrible. As I’d predicted, fear has set off her defense mechanisms, which to people who don’t know her and people who don’t understand the effects of trauma, just appears to be sullenness and resistance. Krystal finally manages to look away from Pretty Boy but then just stares at her feet and barely mumbles into the microphone. She has to be directed over and over again by the judge to speak up, which begins to embarrass her, which in turn comes out as frustration. The mic is loud and the courtroom
is quiet, so after the fifth time the judge rather sternly instructs her to speak into the mic clearly, her annoyed teeth-sucking is heard by all. We’re off to a bad start.

  The day doesn’t get better. Krystal is confused by many of the questions and predictably reacts to confusion with frustration. At one point, the ADA asks her the same question in three different ways, as he’s not satisfied with her answer. Krystal clearly thinks he’s stupid, and to complement the teeth-sucking she now stamps her foot in frustration, visibly and audibly, in the witness stand. A couple of jurors snicker. The rest look at her with disdain. To verify that she was indeed “working” for the defendant and was arrested for prostitution multiple times, the ADA admits into evidence a Polaroid photo taken after one of the arrests and it’s passed to the jury. Even from the court benches, we’re sitting close enough to see the picture as it’s passed from person to person: Krystal at fourteen, already tall and developed, in a skimpy bikini top and short shorts. The men on the jury are quite obviously leering, looking long and close at the picture as if it’s a complicated diagram of blood-spatter patterns. The thoughts in their minds might as well be displayed across a ticker board. The women on the jury hold it like it’s radioactive, looking scornfully at Krystal fidgeting on the witness stand. The picture has told a thousand words, all of them harsh judgments about the “type” of girl who would “choose” to do this. The fact that she’s fourteen in the picture doesn’t seem to register with anyone. The fact that an adult man is accused of beating her, brainwashing her, and selling her on the streets doesn’t seem to provoke any empathy or sympathy. There’s no smoking-gun picture of him brutalizing her with a baseball bat. There’s just a girl in “provocative” clothing, pouting at the camera, and charged with having sex for money. Any chance of being perceived as a victim has just disappeared. In the jury’s minds she’s been branded as a “bad” girl, “loose” girl, and “dirty” girl, and all the JCPenney white cardigans in the world won’t make that go away.