Girls Like Us Read online

  There is an “incident” when I am three years old. Something that is done to me in a park by older teenage boys. My mother tells me later that I won’t speak afterward and just want to sleep for days. She has some friends pray for me and apparently I get better. My mother believes she has done the right thing, and the “incident” won’t be mentioned again until my teenage years when I begin to have blurry, intrusive flashbacks.

  Growing up, I pine a little for Robert, the man I believe to be my father, and struggle with the realization that I am the only person in my first-grade class who doesn’t have contact with their father; even the few children whose parents are divorced still have a “weekend dad.” I have no idea where mine is, what he’s doing, if he thinks about me. Yet despite the father-shaped hole in my heart, I’m OK with it just being me and my mum. I know that we have financial struggles—for a time my mother cleans the house of the grandparents of a girl at my school. Even as a small girl, I am conscious of what this means. I visit their house one day when school is out and I’m struck green with envy. In comparison to our little flat, their home is palatial. They have a sunken bathtub! We rent rooms in a large Victorian house filled with students, my mother the oldest renter there. We share our bathroom with five other people, and later come to learn that our unstable landlord, who is also widely suspected as the murderer of my pet ducklings, has drilled a hole from his attic perch through our bathroom ceiling so that he can spy on us during bath time. I pine for our own bathroom, replete with a sunken bathtub, perhaps more than I do for a letter from my father.

  Yet, amazingly, Robert, whom I’ve met only once for a few hours when I was three, reappears when I’m nine years old, literally knocking on the door and saying, “Hello, I’m your dad,” by way of introduction. My mother, desperate to give me a stable family and perhaps desperate to believe that true love will conquer all—even a previous divorce from the man—marries him again six months after his unexpected entrance into our lives. It’s hard to know what might’ve happened if he hadn’t come back. Perhaps I would have dated older men as a way to deal with my father issues; perhaps my mother would have married someone else whom I would have resented; perhaps I would have grieved his absence but ultimately been OK. But he did come back, and they did remarry, and our lives were turned upside down. My mother comes back from their four-day honeymoon in Paris and tells me, her ten-year-old daughter, that she’s just made the worst mistake of her life. Robert had gotten drunk and tried to choke her on the ferry back from France. I beg her to leave him, but she thinks maybe she should just try harder.

  The incident in France is just the first of many. Within our first month as a family, Robert loses control one night, hits me, and drags me screaming by my hair up a long flight of stairs. My mother cries and begs him to stop. After that night, I keep my distance from him. Robert is an alcoholic who alternates between cold indifference and violent rage. His drinking leads to hitting, which leads to her drinking. The minister at the church where my mother has been a loyal member for years tells her she needs to “submit” as she walks around with a black eye. Our home is a battleground with me desperately trying to referee, standing on chairs and shouting at them to stop fighting, yelling at him to leave her alone, realizing that no one is listening, spending more and more time outside of the house.

  Nobody notices. I feel invisible to everyone but the boys who are beginning to pay attention to me. My ideas about boys and sexuality are already distorted. By the time I take an overdose at thirteen, he’s gone, she’s a raging alcoholic, I’m no longer going to school, our home is up for foreclosure, and I’ve begun to try to take on the adult role of providing both financial and emotional support for my mother.

  The suicide attempt won’t change much. I’ll see a psychiatrist once a week and my mother will drink herself unconscious daily. I’ll continue working as a waitress and in a factory and will never return to school. I’ll spend less and less time at home, eventually moving out totally, and will begin to have relationships with adult men that I’ll think I’m ready for. I will live the life of an adult with the emotional maturity and decision-making skills of a teenager, which I am. The suicide attempt at thirteen will be just one of several over the next few years. I’ll learn by example to deal with my feelings by using as many substances as possible to not feel anything. I discover that it’s much easier to make money shoplifting and using dodgy credit cards than it is to waitress for eighteen hours a day. I’ll get raped several times by the adult men that I hang out with, and treated horribly by the men I date, believing like my mother did that I just need to try harder. My doctor tells me that by the time I’m sixteen I’ll be dead, in jail, pregnant, or some combination of the three. I am a flashing neon sign for danger, for abuse, for a tragic ending. A perfect conflation of risk factors, a statistic waiting to happen.

  Most people assume that children sold for sex in the United States are generally poor, runaways, or homeless, and come from abusive or neglectful homes. The few statistics that exist on commercially sexually exploited and trafficked children and youth actually back up these assumptions. It is probably not surprising that research shows that over 90 percent of trafficked and exploited youth have experienced some form of abuse and neglect and that the majority are runaways or homeless. The most cited study was carried out by Richard Estes and Neil Weiner from the University of Pennsylvania and aptly titled “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.” While Estes and Weiner stop short of quantifying how many children are actually exploited in the commercial sex industry, they do attempt to estimate how many children are likely to be at high risk based on a conflation of predicative risk factors such as sexual abuse, homelessness, and involvement in the foster care system. The authors place the number of children and youth at high risk for recruitment into the commercial sex industry at 325,000, and while there are some challenges in extrapolating “at risk” children into children who will end up sexually exploited, the Estes and Weiner study provides a sense of the magnitude of the problem and underscores the different risk factors that make children so vulnerable.

  Yet to view this issue as simply one of individual risk, of dysfunctional families, of childhoods littered with abuse and neglect, ignores some larger socioeconomic causes. The vast majority of commercially sexually exploited/trafficked children and youth have experienced prior trauma and abuse, thereby making them extremely vulnerable to the seductive tactics of pimps and traffickers, but this hasn’t occurred in a vacuum.

  Commercially sexually exploited young women in the United States, like their foreign counterparts, often come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, making them at higher risk for recruitment than more affluent youth. When we think about children who are sexually exploited in other countries, we acknowledge the socioeconomic dynamics that contribute to their exploitation—the impact of poverty, of war, of a sex industry. Yet in our own country, the focus on individual pathologies fails to frame the issue appropriately. We ask questions such as, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” and “Why would someone want to turn all their money over to a pimp?” instead of asking, “What is the impact of poverty on these children?” “How do race and class factor into the equation?” “Beyond their family backgrounds, what is the story of their neighborhoods, their communities, their cities?”

  SUMMER 1997, NEW YORK CITY

  I arrive at JFK Airport in the late afternoon and am picked up by my new boss, Susan, and her coworker, Val, the only two staff members at my new job, the Little Sister Project, a ministry for adult women in the sex industry. There are awkward introductions, but I’m a little too overwhelmed and excited to care. I’m in America! Everything is at once new and familiar, conditioned as I am to the idea of the United States through television and the movies. We drive past the World’s Fair Observatory Towers in Queens and I immediately recognize it as the alien spacecraft from Men in Black, which I’d just seen a few days before! The cops look just like the
ones on NYPD Blue! The buildings are so tall! It’s a blur of sights and sounds, big and loud, and so many people. As the evening begins to turn dark, Val says they have something to show me, and we pull up on a side street in a place I learn is Brooklyn Heights. I have no idea what to expect and Val and Susan are smug with their surprise. We walk down the side street and turn the corner, and in front of me is the most amazing view I’ve ever seen. The Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the Chrysler Building dominating the skyline, a profile so familiar yet, in person, so breathtaking. The buildings sparkle with hundreds of thousands of lights from office windows, all reflected in the East River and lighting up the sky above it. I know immediately why they sing songs about this city, write rhymes about it, boast about it. I fall in love at first sight. I know that I am home.

  A few hours later, after an Italian meal at the pier, we finally make the drive across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and head uptown via the FDR Drive. As we drive, I’m enthralled by the buildings, the office towers, the projects, imagining all the stories contained beneath each set of lights. When we turn off the FDR, though, the buildings get smaller and duller. It’s clear we’ve moved past shiny, sparkling downtown Manhattan and have squarely landed in the other Manhattan. Susan and Val warn me about the neighborhood, telling me that you can’t go out at night, that there’s a lot of crime and drugs. Given that I’ve spent most of my twenty-two years engaged in, involved with, or participating in some form of crime and/or drugs, this doesn’t really perturb me too much. We park at 116th Street and 1st Avenue, which I’m told is considered Spanish Harlem, and enter a brown building with a brown door. (It’ll be some time before I learn that this doesn’t actually constitute a brownstone and for a while I tell everybody I live in one.) Susan tells me that she and Val share the second-floor apartment; I’ll be living in the first-floor apartment, which also doubles as an office and a crisis shelter, though tonight there are no women staying with us.

  Susan leads me into my new bedroom. The room is small and sparse. No decor to really speak of. A bed. Some linens. A dresser. A mirror. Not much else. I think of my nanny quarters in Germany. The best furnished nanny quarters on the base. My navy, white, and burgundy bedroom, courtesy of JCPenney, with my thick navy carpet and my white wicker furniture. I try not to look visibly crushed. Remind myself that this is where I’m meant to be, my calling, all that good stuff. Tell myself it’ll look better in the daylight.

  I’m exhausted. I’ve been awake for twenty-four hours and even the plain little twin bed is starting to look inviting. The three of us are crowded into my tiny room. I sit down on the bed to indicate my readiness to sleep. “Well, welcome again. We’re glad to have you. Get some rest and we’ll see you in the morning.” Val is consistently chirpy.

  Susan turns to leave, and then stops. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She disappears into the dark hallway for a moment and then returns. “Here.” She hands me a baseball bat and a can of Mace. I’m stunned.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You know, just in case,” she says brightly. “See you in the morning.”

  Once the door is closed, I sit on the bed and begin to cry. The beautiful skyline, the shiny buildings seem like a cruel facade behind which apparently lurks unforeseen danger at every corner.

  I think of the folks in Germany, Americans themselves, who told me to purchase a gun. The woman from Texas at my church who, while she herself had never been to New York, “had friends” and told me, “They don’t just rape you there—they gang-rape you.” I think of all the warnings, the horror stories, the movie scenes, the TV shows. And I wonder what on earth have I just done.

  It wouldn’t take me long, probably till the next morning, when I went and explored my new neighborhood and met the Arab in the bodega, the old lady in the pet store, and the street vendor selling flavored ice, to find out that Val and Susan were just engaging in a bit of fearmongering. My little corner of Spanish Harlem doesn’t feel that much different from half the neighborhoods I’d lived in most of my life, and I grow to love its rich energy. It’s late summer when I arrive; the smell of warm garbage mixes with the smell of arroz con pollo and pernil from the restaurants and the chimichurri trucks that litter the neighborhood. Teenagers out of school crowd corners and babies and mothers sit out late on stoops, taking advantage of the evening’s cooler air, and old and young men park lawn chairs in the middle of the sidewalks to play dominoes and chess. The daily chatter in Spanish, English, and mostly Nuyorican is punctuated by the soundtrack of salsa and merengue pounding from open windows and hip-hop blaring from car radios. The Mace and the bat remain stuffed in a drawer and I revel in the fact that, with my almost black hair and olive skin, for the first time in my life, I look like everyone around me.

  Despite the relative ease that I feel wandering around, even at night, in my newfound community, it’s clear that this is definitely not Europe. The crime, the poverty, the violence are worse. The population of all of England is around fifty million; New York City alone is home to eight million people. I’d seen, and experienced, my fair share of violence, but the weapon of choice in England, due to our restrictive gun laws, was a knife or a broken bottle, generally with the sole intent to maim the person’s face. Even most of the police in England carried only nightsticks. In America, the prevalence of guns, both civilian and law enforcement, upped the ante. The week I arrive in New York, Abner Louima is attacked and brutalized by members of the New York City Police Department. A couple of months later a thirteen-year-old girl shoots a cabdriver in the face, relaunching the debates about super-predators and kids that kill. My natural and often unwise sense of invincibility is shaken a little as I read story after story in the news, see makeshift memorials with votive candles on corners throughout my neighborhood, and hear sirens so frequently that they begin to be just background noise.

  Even the drug culture is different in America. I had had firsthand experience with crack cocaine, having been introduced to it by my “boyfriend.” Yet crack in Europe in the early nineties was still perceived as just another drug, like speed or Ecstasy. Not only hadn’t it reached epidemic status in Europe, in the early nineties crack was still considered something of a novelty, just a quicker way to do coke, yet I’d learned quickly that the addictive properties of crack were much more potent than anything else I’d ever tried. When I come to New York in 1997, it’s at the end of the crack era, although the effects are still visible in the city, in the hollowed-out addicts striding up the block with the unmistakable gait of someone on a mission, in the disrepair of many communities, in the stories of the girls that I am meeting. I find that there is a common belief from people asking about my work, that sexually exploited girls must be drug addicted, and it is the addiction that fuels the exploitation. Yet even in the initial years, and in over a decade that has followed, I’ve found very few girls who are addicted to “hard” drugs and for whom the addiction came prior to the exploitation. To see not just community members but sometimes family members so strung out, so desperate, so scorned does not induce many young people to try a drug with such visibly horrifying effects, and with such a strong stigma attached. Girls weren’t drug addicted, they were love addicted, and that, I’ll learn, is far harder to treat.

  As I do counseling and outreach in Rikers, on the streets, and in homeless shelters for the missionary project, I realize that the girls and young women in their early to late teens that I’m working with are indeed children of the crack era. Born in 1984, 1981, 1980, these are the children who’ve come of age throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as the crack hurricane tore through already struggling communities, ravaged mothers and their families, and left countless orphaned—literally and emotionally—children in its wake. These are the children, whether or not their parents were actually substance abusers, who watched their families rip apart, their neighborhoods disintegrate, who stepped over crack vials on the way to school, mourned the violent death of a brother, a cousin, a friend.
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  I realize, too, how much the crack epidemic disproportionately affected communities of color. One study on the effects of crack notes, “Between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate for black males aged fourteen to seventeen more than doubled, and the homicide rate for black males aged eighteen to twenty-four increased nearly as much. During this period, the black community also experienced an increase in fetal death rates, low-birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.” During this period, the AIDS crisis also began to hit communities. Children were left orphaned by a disease that no one understood and everyone feared. Children who were infected were often not adopted or taken in by extended family members, due to the pervasive stigma about how HIV was contracted, and they too began to flood the foster care system.

  The impact of the crack epidemic and initial AIDS surge on family structures in New York City cannot be overestimated. In 1984, there were 16,230 children in foster care in New York City; by 1992, that number had swelled to over 49,000, overwhelming the already fractured system. These children were primarily black and Latino.

  I think about my own parents’ substance abuse and the devastating impact that it had on me, and then I listen to girls talk about relative after relative whose lives had been turned upside down. In the thirteen years that have passed since I first began to meet with sexually exploited girls, the ripple effects, not just in New York, but in urban areas throughout the country, still have a far-reaching impact that cannot be measured in decreased crime stats or fewer vials on the street. The streets have gotten cleaner and safer and New York is rated one of the safest big cities in America. The murder rate in 2007 is at 494, down from a high of 2,245 in 1990. Spanish Harlem is now called, unbelievably, SpaHa, and the South Bronx is SoBro, at least in the real estate pages of the New York Times. Brooklyn has become the borough of choice for hipsters and developers. In Harlem, 125th Street boasts two Starbucks, an H&M, and a Marshalls. Luxury condos are everywhere, there’s a brand-new stadium for the Yankees, and yet there are still two New Yorks. Just as the gutted, abandoned buildings dotted throughout certain neighborhoods testify to the years when tourists were afraid to visit, and point to the poverty that still dominates many communities, the multigenerational impact of the crack epidemic continues to reverberate in the lives of abandoned and traumatized children.