Girls Like Us Page 24

  Exploited girls need the opportunity to develop new skills, to create a new sense of self. If your entire sense of who you are has been shaped by the sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation that you’ve experienced, it’s tough to begin to learn to see yourself in a new way. For girls and young women who’ve felt “good” only at being in the life, the opportunity to learn new skills and develop hidden talents, whether it’s poetry or art or cooking or boxing or finding out that they’re a great listener, a good friend, or a supportive peer, can begin to reshape and redefine who they see themselves as.

  Yet groups and workshops alone can’t support the healing that girls need. People connect to people, not programs. In an effort to develop appropriate boundaries in programs and organizations, we have often shied away from the concept of love as a tool for healing and recovery, yet the human need for appropriate, unconditional love to help in the healing process cannot be ignored. When girls talk about what has made a difference for them, they talk about “that judge who was mad nice,” “my counselor who was like my second best friend,” or “staff who paid attention to me,” not a specific type of clinical therapy or a certain activity that they engaged in at a program. While these services and opportunities are important, they’re not what initially gets girls walking through the door and coming back again and again. When their strongest connection to another person, their pimp, is removed, they need to feel connected to someone else. During this scary time, having someone to call at 3 a.m., having friends who have gone through the same thing, and ultimately feeling loved can help to alleviate some of the pain and fear of the recovery process.

  Many girls are reluctant initially to come to GEMS when they learn that it’s an all-women/girls program. Girls under the control of a pimp have been ruled with a divide-and-conquer model. Everyone competing for the same crumbs of affection and attention is bound to breed intense jealousy and competition, so girls in the life tend to view each other as threats and rivals, which is their pimp’s goal anyway. Add to these experiences the already internalized messages of sexism and stereotypes about women and girls—They’re mad grimy/shady, You can’t trust females, They’ll steal your man—that many girls grow up believing and it makes it difficult for girls to have genuine and open relationships with other girls. Yet while I’ve seen my share of fights, clothes stealing, and the occasional boyfriend “stealing” (the girls rarely blame the boys for the cheating), overall I’ve been moved by the relationships and friendships that have developed at GEMS and overwhelmingly impressed by the way that the girls support and look out for one another.

  The Cheers theme song, while having the annoying ability to get stuck in your head after just hearing a few bars, actually captures the human need for belonging, community, and understanding in a far more succinct way than any psychologist has ever been able to do:

  You wanna go, / Where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. / You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same.

  Isn’t that pretty much what everyone wants and needs? A place where you feel like you matter, a place where people understand you, a place where you’re surrounded by peers?

  For sexually exploited girls who often don’t have the family structure or support that may be able to provide this sense of community, and for whom this void on some level has been filled by the sense of “belonging” to a pimp, a new type of support system is essential.

  There’s a host of girls excitedly unwrapping the decorations and beginning to unfold the silver plastic Christmas tree. I’m digging in the decorations box for all our nice decorations, knowing full well that within an hour, every single bauble or piece of tinsel, whether it matches our pink-and-silver color scheme or not, will be crowding the tree. I remind myself not to care that the GEMS tree will look tacky; the point of this exercise is not to indulge my whims but to make sure the girls have a good time. As I’m digging in the jumble of fairy lights and plastic baubles, I see the handmade stars that a staff member who was feeling creative had made several years ago with girls’ names and a cutout Polaroid attached to each.

  “Ha!” I dangle the stars and the girls pay attention.

  “Am I there?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Ay yo, look at Nadia when she was mad young.”

  The girls are swapping around the star photos, cracking jokes on each other, trying to remember girls from two and three years ago. The newer girls are trying to get in on the excitement, too. “Who’s this one?” “Where’s she at now?”

  I pull one from the box and my heart stops. It’s a picture of Falicia, a GEMS girl who had passed away a few months before from AIDS. Her death at twenty-four had rocked the GEMS community. Her funeral, held by a family who barely knew her, was awful, but we’d held our own memorial service at GEMS that had been funny and beautiful and sad, and ultimately cathartic. Many of the girls had been frightened about their own HIV status, especially those who were already positive. Seeing their peer pass away so young, in 2007, of AIDS, was surreal for them, and there were a lot of difficult conversations with scared teenage girls who were now confronted with the reality of their own mortality. Out of her passing, however, had come a new determination from some of the girls to speak publicly about their status. Just a few weeks earlier the youth outreach team had organized an HIV/AIDS awareness week that had been a huge success, resulting in many more members getting on-site testing. We had honored her memory and her life in every way we knew how to, and I was proud of the girls for the way they’d rallied and worked to find something good come out of the tragedy.

  Despite this, seeing her picture on the star throws me. All smiles, she is wearing my wool poncho that had been a bad impulse buy but looked cute on her. All the memories and all the sadness come rushing back. I remind myself that we were her home for a long time, and that she knew that she was loved. I remember how we’d all stood outside after the GEMS memorial, prayed, and together released twenty-four pink (her favorite color) balloons into the air. We’d watched for as long as we could see them, crossing the street to watch them float up, become tiny little dots, and finally disappear into the cloudless August sky. I turn my head away from the girls for a second and wipe my eyes. Jasmine hugs me and I know she misses her friend, too. We finish trimming the tree with Falicia’s star perched crookedly on top.

  The decorating fever exhausted, the girls settle on the couch. I treasure these moments, the noncrying, noncrisis, chill-out moments when I can simply enjoy them. The conversation soon becomes a GEMS reminiscing session. Talking about the old days is a favorite pastime. “Remember when Rachel walked into the cabinet and fell over and cut her nose wide open and there was mad blood everywhere!”

  “Uh, thank you, people. I still have a scar from that!” This does little to quieten the laughter. Now we’re on GEMS accidents. In a little while it’ll be GEMS fights, and then stories about the GEMSmobile, my old piece-of-crap car that has a series of stories and jokes all to itself. Just as many of the girls have grown up here, so have I. I was twenty-three years old when I began GEMS and have spent more hours in this office, many of them on this very couch, than I’ve probably spent anywhere else.

  “Rachel, ’member when Sophia sat on a pair of scissors and they went all the way through her thigh and she just pulled them out?”

  “How could I ever forget that? I was so freaked-out. I had to drive her to the hospital, singing Jay-Z songs all the way cos that was the only thing that would keep her calm.” I pantomime driving and rapping with a bleeding Sophia in the back. The girls are laughing hysterically. They can go on like this for hours. As can I.

  My head is full with eleven years’ worth of memories involving hundreds and hundreds of girls. It’s important to tell these stories so the girls feel like they’re a part of history. One of the things I had to learn for myself and have tried to pass on is that you may not be able to choose your family of origin but you can choose your family of creation. W
e’ve created our own little family at GEMS with memories and traditions and rituals. For some girls, GEMS may be something that they just need for a season as they create their own families and support systems, a bridge to tide them over when they’re in pain and as they slowly emerge as young women. For others, it may remain a constant over the years, a place that always feels like home, no matter how long they’ve been gone.

  One of my favorite things about GEMS at any time of year, but especially at the holidays, is that you never know who’s going to walk through the door. Girls who’ve been gone for years will show up for mac ’n’ cheese and the opportunity to relax and catch up with their peers. Girls bring their children, the ever-expanding GEMS extended family of babies, toddlers, and school-age kids, many of whom have literally grown up at GEMS. These kids are now “play cousins” who over the years play together at events and barbecues as their mothers reminisce about the “good old days.” At least once a week, there are the screams of “Oh my God,” “Look who’s here!” and “Ay yo, Rachel—come see who it is!” Girls pretend to look embarrassed by the attention, but they’re obviously pleased to be remembered, to be welcomed. We’ve become the Cheers of trafficked girls, the place where everyone’s always glad you came.

  I’m sitting on the couch, in the middle of an interview with a reporter, when a young woman walks in. She stands by the door, looking at me expectantly. It takes a few seconds to recognize this beautiful young woman as the gangly girl who has been gone for so long. Over the years, I’ve heard that she’s being trafficked to various cities, that she’s doing OK, that she’s doing badly. I’ve wondered for a long time when and if she’ll ever break free. Looking at her, I can tell that she’s back for real, that she’s left him and left the life. Tears roll down my cheeks. The prodigal daughter has returned and while we don’t throw her a huge feast, we do greet her with a lot of excitement and smother her with hugs. Later I wonder if the reporter thinks we’ve staged this little reunion. After all, it is quite miraculous for a girl who came to GEMS when she was twelve years old to return at twenty.

  Amanda, like many of the girls, wants a complete rehash of what she was like years ago, what I remember about first meeting her. I’ve got memories of them all, some much clearer than others, but they never get tired of hearing about themselves when they first came to GEMS. “Do me, do me,” they’ll chorus, as if I’m doing palm readings. I do my best to oblige, struggling sometimes as the sheer number of girls that we see each year increases and my brain feels a little less agile. Amanda, with her outsize personality, I remember very clearly.

  “You were always smart, always had a huge personality,” I say, laughing. “You were my little entrepreneur. I remember when you wanted to raise money with a lemonade stand. . . . You must’ve been, what, twelve? Goodness, that makes me feel old.” The girls laugh, but it really does.

  Jasmine’s incredulous. “Really? She had a lemonade stand?”

  Amanda’s thinking, I did?

  “Yup, you were so insistent. Wouldn’t let me alone until I agreed.” As I talk the details come back to me.

  “I gave you five dollars and you bought a jug and lemons and sugar and set up that little table we used to have, right in front of the office. You tried to set up on the corner but I told you the beauty salon might not appreciate you sitting outside their door.”

  “I can’t believe you remember that,” Amanda says.

  “Did she make any money?” Jasmine is fascinated by the whole story, a time before she came.

  “Nah, of course not! We spent five bucks and I think she made a profit of about 60 cents. Sitting outside in the hot-ass sun all day, with a little sign you made . . .”

  Jasmine and I are laughing hard, picturing Amanda acting like she’s in the suburbs sitting on our little block in Harlem trying to sell lemonade amid all the corner-heads, random passersby, and the hustlers doing their best to sell weed.

  “I can’t believe you remember that,” Amanda says again quietly, and I stop laughing long enough to see her crying.

  “Oh, sweetie, what’s wrong?” Amanda looks at me perplexed. I hadn’t meant to make her cry.

  “I just can’t believe you remember stuff about me when I was growing up.” She’s sobbing now. I get up and give her a hug and realize the significance that my holding that memory for so many years has for her. For her, it means that she wasn’t forgotten, even during all those years when she’d been on the streets disconnected from everyone. It means that she matters. Her healing process is just beginning but at least she feels like she’s in a place where she belongs and is loved and is remembered. There’s a lot more work to do, but it’s a start.

  Chapter 15

  Leadership

  But we do know that the women who recover most successfully

  are those who discover some meaning in their experience that

  transcends the limits of personal tragedy. Most commonly, women

  find this meaning by joining with others in social action.

  —Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

  SPRING 1998, CANADA

  After having been in New York for only eight months, I find myself representing the United States as a delegate to the first international summit of sexually exploited youth. On the first day of the conference, I’m so nervous that I consider staying in my room for six days and watching cable, but I’m worried that this will get back to my boss, so I decide to tough it out. Since I’ve never been to a conference before, I have no idea what to expect. It’s been organized by Cherry Kingsley, a young survivor of commercial sexual exploitation, who has managed to get support from Senator Landon Pearson, an activist on behalf of children; the United Nations; and various other organizations that I’ve never heard of but who are apparently important enough to have raised enough resources to support the attendance of sixty young people from all over the Americas who are there to talk about sexual exploitation based on their own experiences.

  While I’m slowly overcoming my fear of public speaking, at least in the context of the girls and women I work with at Rikers Island, I’m still painfully shy and have little confidence. At breakfast, I find a girl who looks just as terrified as me. Julia and I latch on to each other and sit together in the main conference room as Cherry takes to the podium to deliver her powerful and inspiring opening remarks. I’m in awe. She’s so poised and dynamic. Damn. I want to be her.

  Cherry explains that the purpose of the summit is to ensure that survivor voices are no longer silenced, and that our expertise on our own experiences is heard by policy makers and others in power. This seems to me to be a noble goal, although I’m unsure if I have anything of value to add. We participants are asked to choose among several workshops in the visual arts, drama, dance, or something called “the agenda for action group.” As all the other groups seem to involve some form of creative expression, which to me translates as pretending to be a tree and making yourself look silly, I choose the last, the most tame and boring-sounding of them all. Julia feels the same way and comes with me.

  There are ten of us in the “action” group: three girls from Central America, two guys from Canada, a First Nations girl, Julia, Cherry, and me. Also in our group are important-looking people from the United Nations and from all the other acronym organizations in attendance. There are more of the suits than there are of the youth, and quickly it appears that my wish of remaining silent for the week may come true. The “professionals” seem to be giving lip service to the idea of youth participation and are hogging the microphone, expounding at length on policy and official reports. This doesn’t feel relevant to the work I do daily, and certainly has very little to do with my past experiences. All of us survivors are sitting silently when suddenly Cherry, our fearless leader, interrupts one of the speakers. “This isn’t what I had in mind, this isn’t the point of the conference. You are silencing us again.” She’s not angry, just firm and unapologetic. The suits stop talking and look chastened. “You get to ta
lk all the time, you’re always being heard. This is about survivor voices, not yours. Here . . .” She gets up and begins moving chairs. “You guys can sit in the outer circle and observe; we’ll sit in the inner circle and talk.” The room is shocked, but Cherry’s instincts are right. Once we survivors are in the smaller circle, the atmosphere changes and slowly we begin to get comfortable. Cherry suggests that we start by simply sharing our experiences. Cherry goes first and her openness and honesty about her struggles break the ice.

  And so we tell our stories. One by one, slowly with no interruptions, no sanitized versions, no omissions. We tell how we grew up, how our parents failed us, how we first entered the life, how we felt turning tricks, and how much we hurt on the inside because we couldn’t really explain it to anyone. We cry for each person’s story, because it’s so much like our own and because it’s always easier to cry for someone else. My job back in New York is listening to the stories of women in the life but in that role, I’m a listener, always counseling, consoling, being conscious of my reactions, being careful not to make it be about myself. But at the summit I just let all that go and I cry. I don’t think I’ve ever cried this much in a public setting. All around us are the legislators and the policy makers and the United Nations people and yet I don’t see them. All I can feel is a circle of nine other people who’ve been in the life, just like me. I’ve never felt such acceptance as I do at that moment. Up until that time, I’ve learned to tell my story in a way that is both funny and compelling and a whole lot of other adjectives that manage to stand in between me and the reality. I’ve learned to distance myself from the “story” and tell it like it had happened to someone else. But now when it comes to my turn, I just tell it raw and true. Like I’m telling it for the first time, like I’m telling it to myself. It’s one of those moments that happens spontaneously, that can’t be created and can’t be facilitated. It reminds me of a night when I lived in Munich. I happened to be walking past a bar where a few drunken Irishmen were singing “Danny Boy” just as the rain started to fall. Even though they were drunk, their tenor voices were pure and strong. A crowd gathered to listen to the sheer beauty of the music, many of us with faces streaked with tears, even as the rain fell harder and harder. No one could walk away. That same feeling of transcendence is palpable within our little circle. We cry at the sheer sadness of the stories, and yet no one can walk away.