Girls Like Us Read online

  My entire knowledge of trauma comes from having seen The Burning Bed and The Accused. I understand that I’m reacting to what I’ve been through, but I have no way of knowing if the intensity of what I’m experiencing is normal, what I’m supposed to do with my feelings, if and when this might end. Normal is a concept that I’m still figuring out. I feel exposed, like there’s a huge neon sign flashing above my head alerting people to the fact that I am somehow deficient, tainted, not quite right. Although no one in my new life as a nanny, or at church, really knows much other than that I was a dancer, I’m sure they can tell that I’m damaged goods.

  To reaffirm that, a woman at the church unhelpfully informs me that I have a “spirit of seduction.” I’m not sure what this is, how I get rid of it, or what I’m supposed to do with this information. I’m crushed and spend the next year avoiding all eye contact with any men at church, petrified that I’ll accidentally seduce them. It’ll be a long time before I consider that perhaps the men might bear responsibility for their interests and actions. I learn quickly, though, that what I consider appropriate attire for church and what other people consider appropriate are two different things. I dig out a skirt suit that I’d purchased for some occasion and wear it happily one Sunday, glad to have a suit like the other women. When four separate women come up to me with “lap skirts” to cover my legs, I’m mortified. Apparently skirts need to be longer than your jacket. Who knew?

  Yet it’s not like I have a lot of options. I’ve gone from having a closet full of some really nice clothes to being embarrassed by my wardrobe. It’s November and yet I own two pairs of summer leggings, a few T-shirts, a pair of sneakers, some sandals, a skirt suit that is now unwearable, and three odd shoes without mates. I’m starting over again with less than a suitcase of clothes, the rest having been stolen by a crackhead I stayed with while I was homeless. My boss tells me in a way that she probably thinks is tactful, but that still makes me cry, that my sneakers smell. I already know this but I don’t own another pair. When she hands me some clothes that clearly haven’t seen better days since the 1970s, I want to die with shame.

  I try hard to conform to this new life, this regimented schedule, to suppress all the feelings that want to bubble over and threaten my newfound freedom. Everyone thinks I should be grateful that I’ve been given a “second chance.” Of course, I fuck it up, over a married guy in the apartment building. I don’t even like him that much in the beginning, but he’s quiet and kind and totally besotted with me. He pesters me daily, follows me to the laundry room, declares his undying love constantly. In the end I’m too numb, too tired to resist. My standards at this point aren’t high. The fact that he doesn’t hit me is about all I require.

  As I worked with girls over the years, read articles, and studied trauma and trauma responses, I began to construct a different framework for my experiences. I realized that I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and began to understand that my experiences were normal given what I’d just gone through. It was a pattern that I saw time after time with the girls who came into GEMS, the vast majority of whom have symptoms of PTSD. A study done by Dr. Melissa Farley of 475 people in the commercial sex industry in five different countries found that 67 percent of them met the criteria for PTSD, a figure that rivals that of combat veterans. Traumatic responses can look different for different people. Some girls are numb, so accustomed to pushing down feelings and ignoring their own needs that it’s hard for them to feel anything at all. Others are consumed with anger that’s built up over time, a rage that’s directed at no one and everyone. Some girls struggle with trauma reenactment, a compulsion to re-create the same situations over and over, continually putting themselves in danger, trying to have a different outcome this time. Other girls crave some level of danger just to feel “alive.” It’s the emotional equivalent of going from living in Technicolor to living in black-and-white. Girls whose nights were filled with fighting and violence, a level of danger every time they got into a car or went into a hotel room, who dodged and ran from the police, who never knew what to expect at any moment, now struggle with the relative safety and the danger-free, “excitement”-free, existence that the “square” world affords them. In dangerous and traumatic situations, our bodies are in a fight-or-flight response, physiologically. Once the immediate danger has passed, we can begin to truly feel all the pain and trauma that our minds and bodies have suppressed in order to function. For commercially sexually exploited girls who’ve experienced constant trauma, constant danger, their bodies and minds have been in a continual high alert with little respite to process the experiences they’ve had to suppress. It’s not until things calm down that their feelings surface, and it can be overwhelming, especially if you’re not expecting them or don’t understand why they’re happening to you.

  Just as women who escape domestic violence may experience greater depression once the relationship has ended than they did during the relationship, almost everyone who leaves the life experiences a phase of depression ranging from mild to severe to debilitating. This delayed response to the trauma can be confusing, as the victim may feel as if she was actually better off before. If I’m this miserable now, perhaps going back wouldn’t be as bad. Feelings of depression become linked with feelings of missing him. If I’m this sad, it must be because I can’t be happy without him. In most abusive relationships, there is at least respite from the sadness when the relationship feels good, when he’s being nonviolent. In the context of an abusive relationship, these moments feel all the more rare and precious. In the early stages of leaving, though, there’s little relief from the grief and cumulative pain.

  The emotional aspects of the transition are just a part of the recovery process. Unless girls are lucky enough to have all their needs comfortably met, they are burdened by having to figure out housing, employment, and basic sustenance issues even as they are trying to process all their pain. Just as some domestic violence victims know that leaving the abuser will mean a drastic change in finances and lifestyle, girls understand that in leaving the life they may have to leave everything they own behind and may initially be “worse off.” Victims of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking are not profiting handsomely from their abuse, but there may be some indirect “benefits.” They usually don’t have to deal with issues of shelter and food, although food may be withheld as a “punishment.” Many girls will be allowed, if not required, to get their hair and nails done. Most pimps provide clothing that ranges from a fur coat (rare) to jeans and sneakers (common). But when girls decide to escape, they’re not allowed to take anything with them. Starting from scratch is frightening, and struggling in the first few months to feed and clothe yourself can exacerbate any existing depression.

  Also problematic is that law enforcement, service providers, hospital staff, and family members have such a lack of understanding of the impact of trauma on these girls that they tend to believe they are inherently damaged and irreparable. Girls are labeled “resistant” and “difficult” even by people within the antitrafficking field, and there’s a lot of frustration when they return to their abusers.

  “Rescuing” trafficking victims may sound like a fantastic idea, but talk to any service provider who works with these children and youth, whether in India, Cambodia, Ukraine, Atlanta, or Brooklyn, and you’ll hear that the reality is a little more complex. Victims rarely rush gratefully into your open arms; they’re not immediately compliant with shelter regulations; they don’t trust the people trying to help them. They’re tired and traumatized and hurting and lonely and depressed and scared and to them, missing the life is as normal as breathing. Healing is a messy, complicated process that’s rarely linear. Girls need intense amounts of support, love, and patience. Without someone around to understand and explain that their feelings are a “normal reaction to an abnormal situation,” without practical resources such as food, shelter, and clothing, without constant reassurance that leaving was the right thing to do and
that it’s going to get better eventually, and without counseling or even psychiatric care for depression and PTSD, and the support of people who truly “get” it, girls struggle, and the alternative seems more and more attractive every day. Sometimes even with services, support, love, and patience in place, it’s just not enough to break the trauma bonds the first time around, or the second, or the third. But this doesn’t mean we should stop trying, or that girls don’t want help.

  Chapter 11

  Relapse

  Someday I know he’s coming to call me

  He’s going to handle me and hold me

  So, it’s going to be like dying, Porgy

  When he calls me

  But when he comes I know

  I’ll have to go

  —“I Loves You, Porgy,” Porgy and Bess

  Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. Even though it takes me years to actually be able to say omniscient properly—I’ll call it omniscience—I know exactly what it means, both the dictionary definition, “having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding,” and how it plays out in my real life. I know that he knows everything about me, past, present, and future. I know that he is all of the “omnis,” he’s all-powerful, all-knowing, and no matter where I go he’s there. Even when I run away, he finds me, and either punishes me or cajoles me into “forgiving” him. He feels like a part of my skin, he’s in my bloodstream. When he tells me that even if I get married, have children, and am gone for ten years, he’ll find me, I believe him. When he says that I’ll have no choice but to go with him, that I’ll always belong to him, that I was born to be his, I believe him.

  No one knows what I’ve gone through like he does, largely due to the fact that he was there, putting me through it. During my first few months in the United States, almost three years since we’d last been together, as memories are stirred and trauma is revisited, he’ll be the only one I want to talk to. The only one who’ll understand. I call him, ostensibly for closure but truthfully because despite all my progress, there is a part of me that is still glued to him. We talk into the wee hours and slowly I get sucked back into believing that we can be together, until one night when he asks me to wire him some money and I refuse. His reaction, angry, violent, threatening, is so familiar that even on the phone with him thousands of miles away in another state, I get on the floor and cover my head with my hands. I change my number the next morning.

  Years later, when I find myself in his home state of Texas, just a few hours’ drive from his hometown, I’m tempted to look him up. I realize that like me, he’s aged, yet I’m curious to see this man, now in his forties, even though in some of my most vivid memories he remains young and handsome. He rarely appears in my dreams anymore, and when I’m awake I have trouble picturing his face. It seems strange that while I can see his clothes, his sneakers, his tattoo, his haircut, and his hands, in my mind’s eye I can’t see the face of this man who wielded such power over me. I wonder if he’s even still alive and am strangely disturbed by the thought of him dying—the only other person who’ll ever really know what happened between us, the person who changed me forever, who set me on a whole different life course. We have no acquaintances in common anymore, so no one would call to tell me. He’d just be gone and I wouldn’t know, and for some reason I find this upsetting. Perhaps after years of believing that he would always somehow, somewhere be in my life, that he would never really let me go, I recognize that he isn’t and never will be again. This bothers me enough that I look in the phone book for his number and write it down. But the years and the distance, the therapy and the healing, God, and all my hard work, keep me sane. I stay away.

  Many girls, however, don’t have the option of just ignoring their former pimp. He’s there around the corner, lurking outside their grandmother’s house, threatening their family, sending other people to grab them off the street. The threat is real, his hold secure. Even the pimps who don’t actively pursue girls once they’ve left have created a strong enough psychological hold that girls find themselves inexplicably calling their pimps despite their fervent desire to stay away. Sometimes it’s the very fact that he appears to have moved on and replaced her with a new girl that keeps them going back. Maybe I wasn’t as special to him as I thought. It can be hard to accept that the man they’ve sacrificed everything for isn’t breaking a sweat that they aren’t there, that it really was about the economics of the game. The frightening reality that it was all a lie begins to intrude, and the enormity of that realization can be too much. Perhaps he never loved me. For so many girls, it’s easier to go back and reconstruct the carefully built walls of denial than face the fact that they were manipulated, used, played. That all those nights they were scared, the rapes and the beatings and the arrests, were simply to line someone’s pockets. It’s not surprising that a girl in this situation, feeling ashamed and betrayed, foolish and sickened, will try to think of the good times, and search for a sign that maybe there really was some love there. That night when he said he loved me and took me to a hotel by myself and didn’t make me work, or when he took me shopping, wasn’t that proof? Within a few weeks or months, those are the parts that seem more real and the beatings, the lies, the reasons why she left get hazier and more distant. Calling him just once, going around his neighborhood just to see how he’s doing, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea. Maybe he’s even changed.

  Very few bad relationships are all bad. The same man who used to both physically and emotionally abuse me was the same man who would give me a pedicure and carefully paint my toenails, the same man who would make me the most elaborate breakfasts in bed, clean the house, make me laugh harder than anyone else could. If there had been nothing good, I wouldn’t have stayed. Even most girls’ relationships with pimps, while defined as they are by economic gain and forms of slavery, have elements that are “normal.” Incidences of violence are juxtaposed with the day-to-day realities of everyday life: cooking, eating, sleeping, watching television. Even being put out on the track becomes so normalized, so numbing, that it’s hard for most girls to view this as abuse. It’s just what you’re expected to do, another part of a regular day. Viewing pimps as one-dimensional monsters isn’t that helpful in terms of understanding the girls’ experiences. While the acts that pimps have committed are heinous and deserving of full punishment under the law, overlooking the humanness that the girls surely see only makes it harder to understand why they stay or, especially, why they go back. We understand that women in domestic violence relationships don’t necessarily want the relationship to end. They just want the abuse to stop. It’s what keeps the cycle going, the belief that this time it will be different, that he’ll change, that you can get the good parts back, without any of the bad parts intruding this time.

  Despite pimps’ claims that “pimpin ain’t easy,” it actually is. There’s little reason for them to stop or to change, to choose one girl to “square up” with and start a normal nine-to-five life. Unfortunately, this is the part of the equation that the girls don’t see. Their desire to be “that” girl, the one he really loves and who will make him leave the life, overwhelms all logic. Girls who go back to their pimp aren’t going back because they “miss” the life, they’re going back believing, just like anyone else going back to an unhealthy situation, that things will really be different this time.

  Girls relapse because the pain is no longer tangible. Human beings have a remarkable ability to forget pain. We all remember feeling sad, or hurt, or in physical pain, but we don’t feel it anymore; it’s a cerebral memory, not a physical one. This great defense mechanism probably accounts for the survival of the human race. It’s what enables a woman to go through the pain of childbirth again. It’s what enables us to date again after a soul-crushing divorce, to trust people after horrific betrayals. It’s also what allows us to pick up that one cigarette or drink after months or years of a hard-won freedom from addiction. It’s what enables us to go back to the person who has broken o
ur hearts and who, inevitably, will do so again.

  One of my favorite examples of our ability to forget pain comes from the Old Testament story of the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt and were led by Moses to the Promised Land. Most of the girls at GEMS are semifamiliar with it, either due to some knowledge of the Bible or from the animated movie The Prince of Egypt. I tell the girls how excited and grateful the Israelites were when they first escaped, thanks to God’s parting of the Red Sea. But the Promised Land’s a bit farther off than they thought, and so they’ve got to spend time in the desert first. It’s cool at first, but after a while the Israelites are eating nothing but manna. While they don’t miss being slaves, they miss the good food back in Egypt and forget how bad it really was, how hard it was to leave, how frightened they were, how it took many miracles before Pharaoh would let them go.

  It’s easy to miss the food, whatever that represents to you, when the manna sucks. Especially when you’re fourteen or even eighteen years old. For adolescents who generally have not yet developed a sense of the future, right now feels like forever. The ability to endure a bad situation and imagine an alternative future is something that most adults develop over time. It’s only after your third or fourth serious heartbreak that you begin to realize that the world probably won’t end and that your heart will continue to beat, despite your fervent wishes to the contrary. “This too shall pass” was not said by a teenager. Combine normal human behavior with short-term adolescent thinking, add in the complexities of Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonds, with the persistence of a skilled manipulator, and it’s not that surprising that girls struggle so much with returning to the life.

  Jasmine has been coming to GEMS for almost a year. Initially mandated by the courts, she’s infamous for sitting down with her court advocate on her first day at the program around 9:30 in the morning, and talking straightthroughwithoutstopping until 5 that evening. We joked that we could see her case managers’ eyes glazing over and that she nearly passed out from lack of hydration and food, but it was clearly a significant moment for Jasmine. She’s progressed in leaps and bounds since that night, returning to school, working part-time in the office. I know she’s still struggling with some family issues, but so is pretty much everyone else. Jasmine has real leadership qualities, is compassionate to the other girls, already has begun to serve as an informal peer counselor to some of the newer girls, and is working hard toward getting hired as an official outreach worker. One evening after my weekly group, she starts telling me about her ex-pimp and her face lights up, just a little. He was her first love, at fifteen, and the intensity of the experience is still fresh almost a year later. Nothing can really compete with those heightened feelings of love and fear and belonging, and being owned. Certainly not the day-to-day challenges of being lonely, of feeling unloved, of meeting boys who are ambivalent in their desires. Pimps are never ambivalent. They always want you. Maybe not for the right reasons, but still they want you. And I know that if he calls, she’ll go running. I pray he doesn’t.