Girls Like Us Read online

  I sit down at a sidewalk table at an almost deserted Italian restaurant and immediately order a glass of wine. I drink my first glass like a shot of liquor before the waiter comes back to take my order. From my outdoor seat, I watch the Upper West Side Friday night crowd walking by, girls in groups, couples old and new, solos coming from the gym. I fight the urge to interrupt their leisurely night out. “Do you have any idea what kind of world we live in? Children are being sold!” I want to yell, perhaps for the more placid ones a vigorous shake of the shoulders. I’m disgusted by their ignorance, by their carefree attitudes. I feel ridiculously and irrationally angry at the whole world. I rapid-dial three friends back-to-back and effectively ruin their Friday nights by unleashing all the vehemence and frustration that I’ve just carried forty blocks. “Eleven?” I hear each of them say incredulously in succession. “Yeah, eleven.” If I say it enough, maybe it will feel better.

  Righteous anger and honest sadness apparently take a couple more glasses of wine to temper. I feel woozy and numb, which was definitely the plan, and the desire to accost perfect strangers subsides. I take a cab home and think I’m sufficiently zoned out to sleep soundly, to leave the day behind, and yet I cannot shake Danielle’s face. It stays with me, guarded and silent, as I try to fall asleep. When I dream that night, I’m chasing her, trying to protect her against some shadowy, dream-real, unspecified threat, and yet I can’t save her, and each time she slips from my grasp and closer toward the shadows.

  The trafficking and exploitation of children for sex is a global problem. UNICEF, the international nongovernmental organization for the protection of children, estimates that 1.2 million children and youth are commercially sexually exploited each year worldwide. While globalization has led to an increased number of children and adults who are traded and trafficked internationally, and to a growing business of sex tourists who journey to developing countries for the sole purpose of purchasing sex, the majority of sexual exploitation occurs within a country’s own borders and involves native children and women with native men. Places like Thailand and the Philippines are often pointed to as the worst offenders, yet the issue affects every continent, particularly those regions that are already vulnerable due to war, famine, and natural disasters. In recent years, people have paid increased attention to the plight of trafficking victims and a growing awareness that slavery, in multiple forms, still exists.

  Yet it’s easier to imagine a Danielle on the streets of Calcutta, or in a brothel on the border of the Czech Republic, than to imagine her waiting for a man on the bright, floral, polyester bedspread at some motel in Virginia. Easier, too, to think of her story as an unfortunate but isolated incident, rather than a story representative of potentially hundreds of thousands of children and youth throughout the United States. Yet according to a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 adolescents are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation in the United States each year.

  When I tell people that the agency that I run serves over three hundred girls a year in the New York City metro area alone who’ve been trafficked for sexual purposes, they’re invariably stunned. When I tell them that the girls and young women we serve are predominately U.S. citizens, their shock and sympathy turn to utter incomprehension. “How?” “What do you mean? “From here?” “How?” “Where?” To talk about trafficking conjures images of Thai girls in shackles, Russian girls held at gunpoint by the mob, illegal border crossings, fake passports, and captivity. It seems ludicrous and unthinkable that it’s happening in America to American children.

  It’s often not until you explain that this phenomenon is what is commonly called “teen prostitution” that recognition dawns. “Oh, that . . . but that’s different. Teen prostitutes choose to be doing that; aren’t they normally on drugs or something?” In under three minutes, they’ve gone from sympathy to confusion to blame. Not because the issue is any different, not because the violence isn’t as real, not because the girls aren’t as scared, but simply because borders haven’t been crossed, simply because the victims are American.

  I’m not sure why Danielle’s story particularly got to me that night. After all, this is what I do. I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life working with girls just like Danielle, girls who’ve been bought and sold. I don’t cry after meeting every girl I meet, nor do I drink several glasses of wine after every tough story. Over the years, I’ve learned to develop some distance, a basic ability to hear, to absorb varying levels of horrific detail without taking it all home with me every night. As any cop, emergency worker, or first-line responder will tell you, sometimes something unexpectedly sneaks in, getting through the wall that you’ve so carefully constructed in order to stay sane. Perhaps what got to me was the ease with which men had been able to buy Danielle, right there on their laptops. No lurking about in the streets, no curb-crawling in shady areas. They bought sex online from a child like they were paying a bill, ordering a pair of shoes, booking a vacation. Perhaps it was the insidious nature of her recruitment, the fact that she never stood a chance. A foster care kid, bounced from place to place, with two “older” sisters who had also been trafficked. Or was it the cheap necklace that she so lovingly fondled and the realization of how easy it had been for this adult man to lure her, to seduce her, to become her “boyfriend.” Maybe it was the fact that just a month before I had met her, the New York State Senate had refused to pass a bill that would have created services and support for girls just like her, who were normally treated as criminals, not victims. Perhaps what cracked my armor that night was her age. Even though I frequently recited the statistic that the estimated median age of entry into the commercial sex industry was between twelve and fourteen years old, and had worked with lots of very young girls over the years, there was something about her eleven-year-old puppy fat, her love of roller-coaster rides, that shook me.

  Ultimately, it was all of it. Meeting Danielle that night was a harsh reminder of how much work there was still to do. All the work I’d done for the last thirteen years, everything I’d committed my life to, still wasn’t enough. I thought back to my arrival in New York in August 1997, a wide-eyed and eager-to-help twenty-two-year-old. Danielle was about to turn two years old. When I was meeting sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old girls who’d been raped, tortured, bought, and sold, Danielle was still a toddler, perhaps still sucking her thumb, learning to talk. I can see her, a chubby baby, all curly hair and smiles. A few months later, just after her second birthday, Danielle would be placed in the foster care system, due to her mother’s substance abuse. Danielle would never get to live at home again but she would search for a family in the arms of a man she now calls Daddy, whom she tells me she feels “connected” to. As I started GEMS, learning how to run a program, getting my first office space, Danielle was bouncing from foster home to foster home. As GEMS began to grow, hiring staff, adding programs, Danielle was being groomed and prepared for her recruitment into the sex industry. As I started to feel as though we finally were making progress, Danielle was being sold to her first “customer.” As I advocated for change in New York State laws, Danielle’s pimp was beating her with a belt and leaving scars across her back.

  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 rauc
ous, 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.”