Girls Like Us Read online

  While the crack epidemic has economically damaged many communities, the larger social and governmental policy decisions have been far more destructive. Of course many children who grow up in challenging economic situations thrive, but the reality is that far too many don’t, and too many children’s futures can be determined by zip code. Children in poor neighborhoods frequently receive a substandard education, are often exposed to lead paint in poorly constructed buildings, have higher rates of asthma, and live in communities where there are little to no recreational or green spaces and where entire neighborhoods have been abandoned and forgotten by those in power. Children born into poverty are at risk for many things, including being recruited into the commercial sex industry.

  Nationally, over thirteen million children live below the poverty line. Over half a million children in New York City live in poverty, concentrated in some of the most economically depressed communities, where most of the tracks, unsurprisingly, are located: Hunts Point in the Bronx, East New York in Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway in Queens. Raising children, particularly girls, in areas where there’s an existing sex industry, where johns are still driving around in the early mornings as children go to school, where pimps buy gifts for preteen girls with the intention of grooming and priming them, can be a constant struggle between the home that you try to create and the world outside your door.

  For children separated from their families, the risk for commercial sexual exploitation increases. There are currently over 15,000 children in the foster care system in New York City, and a 2007 study shows that 75 percent of sexually exploited and trafficked children in NYC were in foster care at some point in their lives. When children who have witnessed or experienced abuse and neglect are removed from their families, they often bounce from placement to placement, perhaps experiencing fresh abuse from a new family. When you grow up three blocks away from a track, go to school in overcrowded, underresourced classrooms, and see violence in your community, it’s hard to feel as though you have other options.

  FALL 1989, ENGLAND

  The van leaves at 5 a.m. to get us to the Estée Lauder factory for our 7 a.m. shift. It’s still dark outside and it’s too early for me to engage in the chatter of the other girls in the van. I sit smoking and staring out the window thinking how much I hate this job. Still, it’s something, and it’s helping pay the bills at home, stave off the foreclosure, and keep me stocked in cigarettes and weed, and those are the critical things right now. The social workers have stopped coming to visit, the school has stopped calling. No one seems to notice or care that I’m not in school or that I’m working full-time at fourteen. I’m working through the temp agency as a seventeen-year-old named Rose Johnson, after my great-aunt; the job before that was as Bailey Johnson, after the singer Pearl Bailey; the next place I think I’ll be Cyd Johnson after Cyd Charisse. I can work for only a few months at each place before they start catching on that the National Insurance number I gave them doesn’t match with my name, which is also made up, and begin to ask too many questions for which I don’t have any answers. I’m a few years off from being able to work legally so I’ve been bouncing from temp agency to temp agency, having figured out that they’ll pay you through their own books for the first two months while they’re waiting for your National Insurance card, which in my case will never arrive. One temp agency won’t pay me for a month so I spend four weeks walking five miles one way, doing a twelve-hour shift, and walking five miles back.

  Most of the girls that I hang out with are “Estée Lauder girls.” It’s a badge of honor to work at Estée Lauder as it’s considered one of the more posh factories. It’s also a lifer factory, with mostly women and a few men who have been there for fifteen, twenty years. In an industrial city like Portsmouth with unemployment rates, school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancy rates, and crime rates that are all higher than the national average, getting a secure job is a victory. The lifers look down on those of us who are temps, treating us with disdain. Girls who show real respect for the work fare better. I, on the other hand, make no secret of the fact that I believe I can do more than this. The women there make me sad. They all look so much older than they are, and whatever dreams they might have had have been drained out of them by the monotony of sitting next to a conveyor belt for years. The older women look at me with a mixture of scorn and regret.

  I’m under no illusions, though, that I’ll ever get hired on permanently. I’m forever in trouble. Talking too much. Getting up and leaving the line. Not being quick enough. I loathe the sit-down jobs that require real dexterity. I am, as my grandmother says, cack-handed, and therefore screwing the cap on hundreds of bottles of Red Hot nail polish in twenty minutes is beyond me. I prefer the end of the line, boxing and packing, loading up the pallets, working up a sweat. There I can move around and talk freely. The line manager calls me “Darky,” as in “Darky, get this box,” or “Tell the darky that she has lunch break now.” I know I’d have a good case were I to sue them for racial discrimination, but I’m already working illegally and don’t want to rock the boat. So I save my indignation and spend my shifts daydreaming about ways to get out.

  Other than the “free” samples that somehow wind up in my pocket at the end of the day, and the factory discount store where I stock up on so much Beautiful and Youth Dew that I gift everyone I know with it for three Christmases in a row, I really hate Estée Lauder. I hate the potpourri factory next, although there I’m able to pick up some Christmas shoplifting orders; and then hate the aircraft parts factory; the IBM factory, where we have to wear cover-ups that look like biohazard suits; the tampon factory, where no one ever wants to admit they work; and the Johnson & Johnson factory, where I can never shake the smell of baby shampoo from my skin. As the months pass, I see myself becoming one of the women that I pity. Getting up, going to an awful, mind-numbing job, coming home, voluntarily numbing my mind with weed and alcohol, going to sleep, doing it all over again the next day.

  I cannot share my friends’ enthusiasm for this life, no matter how hard I try. I feel destined for something more, although having dropped out of school, I’m aware that my options are limited. The pressure to have a baby, at fourteen, already feels intense. The desire to create a family, to have someone who will love me, is overwhelming at times. All of my friends are older than me, although still mostly teenagers, and I’m one of the few that hasn’t already had at least one child. Having a baby, getting a council flat, working and living and dying here, feels like the most obtainable goal.

  When someone suggests that I should try modeling, I jump at the chance. I trek up to London to visit agencies and manage to get signed. All the other girls have their pushy stage mothers with them. I’m always alone and have a hard time being pushy, but still I manage to get a little work for some teen magazines that gives me a level of celebrity status in our town, and also gets me jumped by several groups of jealous girls. I will myself to grow the requisite five additional inches needed to sign with a better agency but I stay short. Still, I see modeling as my only ticket out of a town that can offer me nothing but the hopeless future I see in everyone around me. When photographers ask me to pose more “seductively,” to slip my shirt off, to do some “artistic” nude shots for a calendar that I know will end up on some car mechanic’s garage wall, I comply. Anything that’ll get me out. Anything that will make me feel less invisible.

  While there are clear systemic and social issues that leave children vulnerable, the recognition of this reality presents a constant challenge in advocating for exploited girls. In describing the poverty and the abuse that girls experience prior to their commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, the response too often is that these girls inevitably aren’t really going to have great lives anyway. I remember arguing fiercely one day with a lawyer who was representing a thirteen-year-old who’d been charged with a serious crime that her thirty-five-year-old “boyfriend” had committed. I wanted him to fight for her to be charged as a juvenile so th
at her record would eventually be sealed. Snorting with laughter, he said, “It’s not as if she’s going to be a brain surgeon, so does it really matter?” It appears that if you’re already considered damaged goods, or doomed to a life of poverty, then being further victimized is not quite as bad.

  For a time, one of the most widely referenced articles on commercial sexual exploitation in the United States was a 2003 Newsweek cover story titled “This Could Be Your Kid.” The article’s sensational claims of suburban “teen prostitutes” and otherwise supposedly normal girls who simply sold sex for designer clothes dismissed the real issues of commercial sexual exploitation, such as race, poverty, homelessness, abuse, ineffective city systems, and a public policy that blames the victims. The public reaction to this article, motivated by fear of so-called inner-city issues affecting their own children, was starkly portrayed by a “counselor” who was quoted in the article as saying, “People say, ‘We’re not from the ghetto.’ The shame the parents feel is incredible.” In follow-up media on this article, the unsubstantiated claim was made that 30 percent of prostituted youth were from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. This “fact” completely ignored the other 70 percent of youth from low-income backgrounds. It was as if this 70 percent didn’t matter as much because their abuse was inevitable anyway.

  All of this is not to say that only socioeconomically disadvantaged children are at risk. While there aren’t clear national statistics on the socioeconomic backgrounds of children who are commercially sexually exploited, we do know that there are children who are recruited into the sex industry who don’t fit the commonly understood profile of an “at-risk” child. These are children from middle-class backgrounds, children who haven’t suffered extreme trauma or abuse, children who have been sheltered and cared for. Commercial sexual exploitation can happen to any young person. Every parent should be able to have a conversation with their child about the sex industry and how children are recruited. The Internet has opened up a whole world of information to children and yet it has also brought the threat of predatory strangers right into our homes. Global accessibility means that a teenager in Ohio can connect online with a teenager in Liverpool, yet it also means that a thirty-year-old man who trolls the chat rooms looking for children can instantly connect with a thirteen-year-old in his own community. Exploiters are utilizing the Internet more and more to search for vulnerable children and adolescents who can be used for both sexual and commercial purposes.

  Children are vulnerable just by virtue of being children. Getting frustrated with your parents, thinking you’re invincible, engaging in risky behavior, being interested in relationships, particularly with older men, and being enamored with money and consumer goods are all part of most American adolescents’ experiences. In the heady mix of hormones, wanting to belong, confusing messages about love and sex, and a desire to be independent, it’s easy to lure an otherwise well-adjusted fourteen-year-old girl into a meeting, into a car, into a bed. Pimps understand child psychology and adolescent development well enough to know the dynamics at play and can skillfully manipulate most children, regardless of socioeconomic background, prior abuse, or parenting, into a situation where they can be forced or coerced into being sold for sex.

  Yet it may take longer to manipulate the well-adjusted fourteen-year-old, and in the process she’ll be missed pretty quickly by her parents, who’ll notify the police, who may put out an Amber Alert. There might be a story on the eleven-o’clock news about her disappearance, and once she’s found, the perpetrator is likely to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But if you shift some of the variables in the case—make the child a child of color, a runaway, a child in the foster care system, a child no one’s really going to miss, a child so starved of attention and affection that anything you provide will be welcomed, a child who’ll be seen as a willing participant in her own exploitation—the story changes dramatically. There’s no Amber Alert, no manhunt, no breaking news story, no Nancy Grace coverage, no police investigation, no prosecution. It’s just another “teen prostitute,” another one of the nameless, faceless, ignored, already damaged 70 percent.

  Chapter 3

  Family

  Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop,

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  —Traditional

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 1988, ENGLAND

  My mother sits on the big brown couch in our dark brown living room, staring straight ahead. When she’d first decorated, she’d been aiming for a Victorian theme, although now her mood, combined with the dark colors and heavy wooden furniture, just seems funereal. An empty bottle of wine sits on the table; if I had to guess, I’d say there were two more freshly finished empties stashed in the oven. My mother thinks I don’t know about her hiding places, but it’s a little difficult to ignore fourteen bottles of wine tumbling out when you’re trying to cook some dinner, or the twelve cans of beer that appear mysteriously in place of the cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. In recent weeks, or in the three weeks since Robert left, my mother’s drinking has either dramatically escalated, or she’s taken less pains to hide it; probably a little of both. She’s trancelike most of the time, comatose sometimes. The violent-drunk stage won’t come till later. I tiptoe around her and the huge elephant in the room that is her pain. At thirteen, I’m a little perplexed as to why she’s so devastated. I’d thought she’d be relieved when he left. I am. I couldn’t wait for him to go, and have been praying fervently at night for him to be gone, in a variety of ways, not all of them appropriate for prayer. Yet now that he’s physically out of the house, his absence seems to cast a heavier pall for my mother than his presence did. She’s like a deflated balloon. At least when he was there she had something to focus her anger on, somewhere to direct her sadness. Now it seems these feelings are overwhelming her, and the only place to unload them is on me. I feel like I’m drowning in her grief. I try to leave the room before she notices me there.

  “Where do you think he is now?”

  I’ve got a pretty good guess, at a pub, but I just shrug and look clueless.

  She pats the seat next to her, so I reluctantly sit down.

  “Do you think he’s seeing someone else?”

  Um, yeah, probably. “I dunno, Mum. Prob’ly not.”

  “I need to know. It’ll help me feel like it’s really over.” If I was older and wiser, I’d know that this is bullshit. But at thirteen, it sounds logical.

  “Can you go look for him? I need to ask him something.”

  This, however, does not sound logical. This sounds like a bad idea. He’ll be drunk. He’s always drunk. If you could get a straight and sober answer out of him, any answer, really, he’d probably still be here and she’d be angry, uptight, sad, but a little less. . . . still. It’s the stillness that’s really bothering me. I’d prefer her to be throwing shit, but all she does is sit, quietly, and drink. I did have plans for this Christmas Eve, though: buy a bottle of Thunderbird, drink, walk up and down Albert Road; linger outside the pubs (which I look old enough to get into but, inconveniently, my best friend, Stephanie, despite being three years older than me, doesn’t); catch the attention of some guys, probably older, probably coming out of a pub; flirt with said guys; go to the kebab shop; eat; meet up with my sometime boyfriend, Ras, after his waiter shift; walk home; make out on the couch; send Ras home. Not that much different from what happens on a regular Saturday night, really, but still, maybe something cool will happen because it’s Christmas Eve. Going on a mission for my mother will probably screw up all these plans.

  She’s latched on to the idea, though, and keeps pestering me, or at least keeps looking pathetic and depressed until I agree. I decide to say, “I’m going to look for him,” but then don’t do it and stick to my regularly scheduled plans. Win-win.

  Stephanie and I set off, Thunderbird drunk, up and down Alb
ert Road. Christmas Eve, next to New Year’s Eve, is the busiest night of the year. It’s not as much fun as on a Saturday night. The streets are too crowded, the men are too drunk. We’re about to walk into the Royal Albert when I walk straight into Robert. Not surprisingly, he’s drunk; somewhat surprisingly, he’s got a woman hanging on his arm with whom he’s clearly engaged in some intimate conversation. Crap. I didn’t really want to find him, didn’t really want to be involved in this mess. He’s too drunk to be embarrassed, although his girlfriend isn’t. It gets a little awkward when he introduces me as his daughter but other than that, it’s clear that he could not care less. To be fair, I don’t care that much about him either. What I do care about and what I worry about the whole way home is how on earth I’m supposed to tell my mother that her husband has found himself someone else while she sits home and drinks and cries.

  It doesn’t go well.

  The following day’s Christmas dinner won’t be eaten. It was shoplifted, as were most of the presents, which will be given a cursory glance then ignored. I knew we didn’t have any money, that my stepfather had left us “high and dry,” as my grandmother liked to say, so I’d resolved to bring some Christmas cheer of my own and engaged in my first of many shoplifting sprees to supply the need. It doesn’t really matter, though. Nothing really lifts the mood at home, nothing really breaks the stillness except the sound of the liquor pouring into the glass.