SockFoon C.MacDougall
Trafficking Monitor
June 30, 2011
Girls Like Us insightfully tells the story of how young African American girls become exploited in the commercial sex industry and compassionately reveals the brutality of their entrapped lives.It is also Lloyd’s memoir, a reflection of her time in “the life,” examined in relation to the informing experiences of the girls. Several of the chapters are organized around the key players in commercial sexual exploitation, such as pimps,victims, and cops. The other chapters engage the fundamentals in the struggle for a new beginning, including leaving, relapse, stigma, and healing.
As I perused Girl Like Us, I particularly focused on three questions. How do the young girls become trapped? How do the pimps exercise control such that leaving them is not an easy option? Why do the girls not go to the police for help? Drawing on herexperiences as well as those of the girls, Lloyd’s narrative provides credible answers.
The conventional view of these girls is that they are teen prostitutes -- criminals who choose prostitution as a way of life. To this,Lloyd posed a thoughtful question. Are these young girls sufficiently mature to make the ill-fated decision of entering into the sex industry? Her nuanced account revealed that they are, in fact, commercially sexually exploited girls, some as young as ten years old. Lloyd argued that the social and economic dynamics in the girls’ background have primed them for predatory men. Almost all have dysfunctional families and live in poverty in crime-infested neighborhoods where run-ins with the law are routine. In addition, “[physical and sexual] abuse, neglect, and abandonment” are normative. These factors collectively put the girls at greater risk of being lured. As part of the recruitment game,the pimps shower them with attention and gifts and even offer a pseudo family in some instances (made up of “wives-in-law” with “Daddy” at the head). These are elements largely missing from their impoverished lives, and for which they yearn, pseudo family notwithstanding. While most are lured, some girls are kidnapped, broken by gang-rape, and forced into the commercial sexual industry. So they seem more victims than criminals.
The girls suffer extreme violence and exploitation at the hands of their pimps. Yet, they do not readily walk away, but “continued to profess abject devotion.” What control mechanisms are at work here? One, Lloyd suggested, is the tight control pimps exercise over the girls’ interactions, not permitting communication with anyone outside “the life.” Lloyd also reasoned that the girls are already bruised and vulnerable by the time of recruitment. The pimps, she stated, would alternately show kindness and violence, a deliberate strategy against which they are vulnerable. Consequently, the girls’ every effort at freeing themselves is “jerked back … by some invisible bungee cord,one end attached to the men they ‘loved,’ the other tightly wrapped around their necks.” The oft-asked question, “Why don’t they just leave?” is a testament to misinformation.
Lloyd stated that the cops she worked with often complained that the girls “didn’t want to talk to them … were ‘resistant’ to help.” From the girls’ perspective, this makes good sense. Many of them are from African American communities where distrust of the criminal justice system is legend. In their experience, cops apparently routinely arrest and/or harass family members and friends. Lloyd also reported that cops have threatened the girls with jail if they refuse sex, described professional trips to take them in as “trash runs,”extorted money, and have even been johns. When the girls claimed rape, Lloyd stated cops consider it “a question of not getting paid … [a] theft of services.” Is it any wonder that the girls mistrust and even fear them?
Many of the exploited girls in the commercial sex industry are disproportionately black or brown and low-income. Lloyd examined the nexus of race, class, and a history of (exploited) commercial sex on the girls’ credibility in the criminal justice system and news exposure. Lloyd is to be congratulated for drawing attention to this. In one example, she reported that a young girl, just twelve years old, was charged with prostitution and elected to go to trial. Neither the media nor the court found her a sympathetic or credible figure despite the fact that she was clearly under the control of her pimp, and evidence of his physical abuse was found on her body. The child was sentenced to a juvenile detention center for a year to be taught “proper moral principles.” In another, example, Lloyd reported that many of the African American girls she worked with have been found to be missing at one time or another, yet, according to her, not a single Amber Alert has been issued. She contrasted this with the massive media exposure and sympathy given to missing white, attractive middle-class victims with no “history.”
Lloyd is correct that public awareness of American girls lured into the commercial sex industry lags behind that of internationally trafficked women and girls forced into prostitution. However, I would say that even knowledge about international trafficking is far from widespread or even believed outside of the anti-trafficking community. Lloyd attributed the lack of public sympathy for the American girls to the fact that “borders haven’t been crossed [and] simply because the victims are American.” I see this more asa knowledge issue, which behooves the U.S. anti-trafficking NGO community and law and policy makers to actively raise consciousness and to ensure that the girls are treated as victims and not criminals. Both domestic and international trafficking are egregious violations of human rights and dignity.It is to Lloyd’s credit that her persistent advocacy contributed to the passage of the Safe Harbor Act, which made New York the first state to protect rather than prosecute sexually exploited girls.
I recommend Girls Like Us to all who engage with commercially sexually exploited girls in the criminal justice system and as a text in high school and university courses on human trafficking.
No comments:
Post a Comment