Girls Like Us Read online

  Despite the prevalent and often extreme levels of abuse and neglect, the girls literally crave a real relationship with their families, particularly their mothers. Even in the healthiest of families, conflict between adolescent daughters and their mothers is common. Navigating this intense relationship is a minefield of rolled eyes, reminders of lost youth on the one side, wanting to be nothing like her on the other—and that’s in the good relationships. Young girls often idolize their mothers until one day they begin to resent them. They start seeing characteristics about them that disappoint them or embarrass them. They reject the choices their mothers have made and yet seem predestined to repeat many of the same mistakes. As a girl you reserve your harshest judgment for your mother; as a woman you see yourself, for better or for worse, in your daughter and you’re alternately frightened and envious. Yet your mother is the one person who is “supposed” to love you and protect you, no matter what. For many sexually exploited girls, this relationship has been the one that has caused the most pain and left the deepest scars. It took me a long time to understand how impacted I’d been not just by my biological father’s abandonment and my two stepfathers’ abuse but by my mother and how difficult it had been to always come second in her life to a man, to a bottle.

  WINTER 1990, ENGLAND

  Like any Saturday night, the routine is pub first, club later. Tonight though, I’m not sure if I want to go out all night so after a few pints at the pub I come home. My mother and her boyfriend have broken up again for the eight millionth time this month and she’d been upset, and of course drinking, when I’d left earlier. I want to at least check on her. I know what she’s capable of. My mother, however, is annoyed to see me come home at 11 p.m. and even more annoyed by the idea that I might stay home all night. “You should go out, you’ll have fun. Go to Ritzy’s.” My mother knows that at fourteen I shouldn’t be able to get into the nightclubs but given that I smoke weed, sniff speed, and pop Ecstasy tabs at home in front of her, we’re long past the point where she’s concerned about this. Some nights, embarrassingly for me, we bump into each other at the same clubs. My friends think she’s cool. I don’t.

  “Nah, I’m OK. I’d rather watch telly tonight. It’s just the same old people out every week anyway.”

  The truth is that I’m worried about her. She’s drunk and slurring, but with the odd calmness that I’ve grown to associate with impending trouble. We debate back and forth as she insists that I go out. It’s not exactly going to be a barrel of laughs sitting around the house with her, so eventually I agree. “You’re fine though, right? Not gonna do anything?”

  “I’m perfectly fine. I’m just going to go to bed soon anyway.” I think she’ll probably drunk-dial her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend a few times, but he’s used to it by now. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re back together by the time I come home. I give her a kiss and tell her to be safe. I’m used to the parental role now. It comes naturally.

  By 4 a.m., I’m back home again. Tired from a night of dancing and drinking at Ritzy’s. Happy because David Shaw, my latest crush, has finally paid attention to me and has come home with me for a cup of tea and a make-out session. The house is dark and quiet when we come in. Whispering and tipsy, we tiptoe into the kitchen and kiss for a few minutes in the dark until I put the kettle on for the obligatory cuppa. David puts the light on.

  “What’s this?” he asks, and I turn to see him picking up a piece of paper from the table. I’m sorry, I just can’t . . . I snatch the note away and read the rest as my stomach drops and my hands go cold. “Fuck.”

  I drop the note and run upstairs to her bedroom, which is empty, check the bathroom, and my room. All empty. I have no idea where she is but I’m hoping that someone found her.

  When I come back down to the kitchen, David’s still there looking awkward. “It’s OK. You can leave.” I know he hadn’t bargained for walking into a family suicide attempt. To his credit, he stays and we sit in the kitchen drinking tea while I try to call anyone who might know what has actually happened to my mother, if she’s alive or dead. By daybreak, her boyfriend shows up and tells me that he’d come over to check on her and found her semiconscious. He was the one who called the ambulance.

  He tells me they’ve pumped her stomach and that she’s going to be all right. He tells me she took the overdose around 10 p.m. It’s easy to do the math. While I was sitting on the couch trying to persuade her to let me stay home, the tablets were already beginning to course through her bloodstream. No wonder she’d been so adamant that I go out and have a good time. She wanted me gone so she could sit down and die. I look at David and think about what that would’ve meant had she succeeded. As she was dying, I would have been out dancing. I had almost been too busy kissing him to see her suicide note.

  While my mother survived that episode and several other suicide attempts over the years, the impact of her virtual and often literal abandonment leaves me fearful and hypervigilant. Always looking out and waiting for signs that someone, anyone I care about, is leaving. Most of the girls I meet through GEMS over the years share some variation on this theme. Some have lost their mothers to AIDS, to overdoses either intentional or accidental, to murder, to illness brought on by drug addiction, to cancer detected far too late. For girls whose mothers have died, the abandonment is final; there’s no chance for closure, for nurture, for a mother’s touch. Regardless of how unhealthy the relationship was, their mother’s death prevents them from ever “fixing” it.

  One evening, Lisa, a new girl who has said very little to me in the few days she’s been coming to the office, tells me that I look like her mother, who passed away a few years earlier. She stares at me for a long time, her yearning for her mother so raw and tangible. “I think if I could just touch your hair it would feel the same.” The look of total longing on her face is hard to witness.

  For those girls whose mothers are still alive, there is still hope, at least theoretically. However, this is rarely borne out by any historical evidence and is really just a childlike belief that one day things with Mommy will get better. One day she’ll treat me differently. One day we’ll be a real family. More often than not, the potential for change is outmatched by the potential for continual disappointment and rejection.

  Over the years as I’ve worked with hundreds of girls and young women, I’ve often been outraged and angered by the behavior of so many of their mothers. Sometimes I’ve probably projected my own feelings about my mother onto theirs; sometimes I’ve just been horrified by the capacity for human cruelty. And yet as I’ve gotten older, reaching the age my own mother was when I was a teenager, I’ve wondered, if the situation were reversed, if life had turned out a little differently for me, how well would I have coped with raising a child alone? How much of my own pain and hurt would I have unwittingly passed down?

  Even in a role as a mother figure to many girls, I’ve failed at times, made mistakes, or hurt them without ever meaning to. I’ve learned to have more patience with many of the mothers, grandmothers, and aunts that I know, understanding that many of them are simply overwhelmed and underresourced, are spending too much time working to pay the bills to pay attention to what’s going on at home. For most of them, violence is generational and abuse is hereditary. Some mothers have heard the same words—whore, slut, you’ll never be anything, you’re a piece of shit—repeated from grandmother to mother to daughter. One afternoon at GEMS, I hear Aisha tell her two-year-old daughter that she’ll break her fingers if she touches something again. I feel anger boiling up and tell her to come into my office. Immediately I start to launch into an angry diatribe about how you speak to children, but one look at Aisha’s face and I remember the stories she’s told me about her crack-addicted mother who abandoned her, the coke-addicted auntie who raised her. I can hear her aunt’s voice telling me that Aisha was “loose” as a little kid and that she knows she “ain’t shit,” and I dial back my self-righteous lecture. I know that the result of this little chat will be th
at she probably won’t yell at her daughter in the office anymore, but it will take a lot more than this or any other conversation, more than the court-mandated twelve-week parenting classes she’s completed, to erase the lessons, the words, the reactions that have been drilled into her for the last eighteen years. I watch her daughter playing, a little guarded perhaps, and wonder how old she’ll be before she starts resenting the fact that, like Aisha, she lives with Auntie, not her mommy; or how long it will be before she hates the way her mother talks to her, all the while yearning for her mother’s undivided love and attention. I wonder what it will take to break the cycle.

  Most of the mothers (or aunts and grandmothers who’ve taken their place) are dealing with their own struggles, bad memories, painful relationships, failed dreams, and disappointing jobs, but there are exceptions. There are mothers who have overcome addiction and reclaimed their children after being clean for a few years but are frustrated that their child hasn’t “gotten over it,” not understanding the depth of the damage that was done. There are the mothers who have walked away from abuse, struggled in the shelter system out of a desperate desire not to allow their children to witness violence. There are women who have gone from relative economic security to poverty because they chose to leave their abusers. There are mothers who are doing their best, struggling to work and make ends meet, who find themselves having to take a chance on makeshift day care, a neighbor, a friend of a friend. There are mothers who believe their child when she says she was abused, but are still reluctant to send her to counseling, out of a conviction that strangers shouldn’t be in your business. There are mothers who try to do everything right once they find out their child has been molested, only to discover years later as adolescence hits, that their daughter is still scarred and broken despite the therapy appointments that were like a Band-Aid over an amputation.

  And then there are the mothers who have settled, have stayed with the man, because he’s a man, and you don’t know when one might come along again, so you stay and you ignore it, whatever it is, the drinking, the late nights, the other women, the hitting; the line just keeps getting pushed back further and further, until one day your daughter tells you that he did something, and you just know she’s lying, how could he, why would he, she’s just a child, you’re a woman, he doesn’t need to, that’s disgusting, of course she’s lying, she’s been acting a little fast, a little grown anyway, so you slap her in the face for telling such heinous lies, and when she doesn’t say anything again you know she’s learned her lesson about that kind of bullshit. After all, you didn’t say anything when it was happening to you all those years ago.

  Like all forms of child abuse, sexual abuse teaches powerful, life-changing lessons and with an estimated one in four girls being victims of sexual assault or sexual abuse before the age of eighteen, it’s not surprising that sexual abuse often impacts families multigenerationally. Abuse that is passed down from grandma to mother to daughter, family secrets that are rarely shared. Girls and women bearing a silent burden.

  Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: My worth is my sexuality. I’m dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries. That shapes their ideas about the world around them: No one will believe me.Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can’t be trusted. It doesn’t take long for children to begin to act in accordance with these belief systems.

  For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant. The lessons learned during sexual abuse are valuable ones for recruitment into the commercial sex industry. As Andrea Dworkin once said, “Incest is boot camp for prostitution.” Numerous studies estimate that 70 to 90 percent of commercially sexually exploited youth and adult women in the sex industry were sexually abused prior to their recruitment. No other industry can boast of such a large correlation between early sexual abuse and future “employment.”

  Sexual abuse lays the groundwork. The pimp, the trafficker, doesn’t need to do much training. It’s already been done—by her father, her uncle, her mother’s boyfriend, her teacher. She’s well prepared for what’s to come.

  Chapter 4

  Recruitment

  Kaa was not a poison snake—in fact he rather despised the

  poison snakes as cowards—but his strength lay in his hug, and

  when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there

  was no more to be said.

  —Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

  There were many people on the Metro North train to Grand Central Terminal that day who stared at the young girl hunched in the corner seat. Perhaps it was the fact that she was wearing baggy pajama bottoms and slippers under her big overcoat, but despite this strange attire, no one approached her. Tiffany was aware of the stares but used her best tough-girl scowl to intercept any glances that might have turned from curiosity to concern. At twelve, Tiffany had perfected the art of warding nosy people away. She’d learned that nosy people took you away and put you in places where you didn’t want to be: teachers who’d wondered about her absences, the stranger who’d called the cops when she saw the six-year-old girl in the park still waiting for her mother to come back way after dark, social workers who’d investigated her mother’s drug use and decided that she was unfit, child welfare workers who asked too many questions and put her in an upstate group home. These lessons had taught her well, so Tiffany scowled. Everyone went back to reading their newspapers and taking naps. That day no nosy people asked that twelve-year-old girl in pajamas any questions and Tiffany rode the train in peace, away from the group home and back to the city.

  When she arrived at Grand Central, she hopped the subway shuttle to the Port Authority terminal. Tiffany didn’t really have a plan and she didn’t have any money, but 42nd Street had always held a certain appeal for her, with its bright neon lights and constant bustle of people. It had that feeling of excitement, of opportunity, and Tiffany figured that she’d place herself smack in the middle and wait for opportunity to arise. It was early in the evening and a light rain had to begun to fall. People hurried into the train station to escape the rain, yet Tiffany stayed outside, letting the rain wet her face, enjoying the feeling of freedom. She stayed outside the Port Authority as the rain fell harder, and just as she was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her decision to leave the relative warmth and safety of the group home, she finally caught someone’s attention.

  Tiffany was a striking child with skin the color of rich espresso and sharply accentuated cheekbones. Her body was still caught in a battle between childhood and adolescence. Tiffany had developed some breasts, but her gangly limbs and her physical awkwardness betrayed the body of a growing child. She was uncomfortable with her body and her appearance; she’d heard that she was “too dark,” “too black” her whole life, and she carried that knowledge with her like a weight that she desperately wanted to put down. Attention from boys, or men, always helped ease that weight a little, so when the young man, dressed in neatly pressed jeans and a jersey, approached her and asked if she was OK, she smiled quickly and easily, grateful for the attention.

  The boy, who said his name was Charming, seemed kind and friendly. He was more polite than the other boys Tiffany was used to, he talked to her like a person. He asked her if she’d like to get something to eat with him at a diner on 44th Street. Tiffany had not eaten anything since lunch, a ham sandwich and an apple, at the group home nearly eight hours earlier, and she nodded enthusiastically. The diner was run-of-the-mill as diners went, but a boy had never taken Tiffany out to eat before, so she viewed the red Formica tables and huge menus a little nervously. She was immediately self-conscious about her striped pajamas and furry slippers; the soft pink fur was now wet and bedraggled. But Charming made a joke about growing up in pj’s and told her she still was the prettiest girl in the place, putting
her at ease. Without even looking at the menu, Tiffany ordered her favorite meal in the world, buffalo wings, and munched hungrily on them. As she began to dry off in the warmth of the diner, and warmed under the kind and interested gaze of his eyes, Tiffany began to tell him that she’d run away from her group home and didn’t really have anywhere to go. She surprised herself by telling him about her family, that her father was in jail and she wasn’t sure where her mother was but that she was somewhere getting high. She told him how she’d been in foster care since she was nine and how she hated the constant upheaval, the moving from home to home, three times in three years. How she’d lost her virginity to a fifteen-year-old boy in a group home when she was nine, but then he broke her heart. How she wanted to be a lawyer and have three kids. Everything that she felt and thought, she told Charming as the night grew later and the other customers began to leave. The counselors at her group home were always frustrated that she didn’t want to talk about her life, they said she kept things too much to herself, but it was because she didn’t trust them. It was just a job to them, they didn’t really care, they looked at the clock as she talked and rustled papers around their desk to signal it was time for her to leave, but Charming seemed different. He really did listen, didn’t offer advice, just listened as it all came tumbling out of her mouth. When he finally did talk, his words were like music to Tiffany’s ears, the words she’d always wanted to hear. He told her that she could live with him and he’d be her boyfriend, they’d be like a family, he’d protect her and make sure that she had everything she needed. Tiffany felt like it was fate: She’d run away and straight into the arms of a man who would care for her and love her. When he said, “Let’s go home,” she agreed, and in the back of the yellow cab that they took to his apartment, she smiled to herself and repeated silently over and over again, “I’m going home, I’m going home.”