Authors: Rachel Lloyd
It takes an altered date of birth on my passport and about four minutes to get hired as a “hostess”—starting immediately, cash same day. It’s too good to be true. Get paid to sit at a bar and drink? I already drink like a fish, or more accurately like my mother. This will be an easy job. My tired, hungry teenage mind wants to believe that drinking with the customers is really all there is to it. And with the first customer that’s all I’ll have to do. But by the end of my first shift, I want to scrub my skin off, even though I’ve earned more that night than any of those shitty cafés would’ve paid in two weeks. In a gesture of celebration that I don’t really feel, and because I’m drunk, I use ten marks of my day’s earnings to catch a cab home. Out of the club, in the cold air, the black line feels blurry. I feel like everyone’s looking at me, everyone knows my dark and dirty secret, which I want to stay hidden behind the door of the club. Driving in the cab, I watch women on their way home from work, on their way to a date, and I feel like a voyeur into the normal world. I haven’t crossed “The Line,” but I’ve crossed a bunch that I thought I never would. Still, plenty of men have touched me when I didn’t want them to; none of them has paid for the privilege. I figure I can keep some boundaries given that I’ll be at the club only for a few weeks, three tops. Get enough money to pay the rent, buy a ticket home and never, ever, ever tell anyone what happened. That night, I buy food and pay the rent before I get evicted. The next day I pile on the makeup, give myself a whole different look, change my name, and go back to the club. The more distance I can keep between Rachel and this other person who just needs to survive right now, the better. But the Line keeps moving and the boundaries keep blurring and it’ll be a long time before I see Rachel again.
In recovery, as an advocate and running GEMS, for a long time I’ll feel guilty about the way I entered the sex industry. In a radio interview one day, an abrupt interviewer who keeps calling me an ex-prostitute objects to my correction and use of the term “commercially sexually exploited.” “Well, you were older, so obviously you made a choice,” she declares. I object again, but her accusatory and judgmental pronouncement stings. A few moments later when she calls my girls “ghetto girls,” I let her know in no uncertain terms that I’ll be terminating the interview, and hang up on her. I recognize that she’s rude, obnoxious, and racist, but still, her earlier comments bother me. Obviously you make a choice. As I struggle with it that night, I concede that yes, I made a choice. No one put a gun to my head, unlike Samantha, who was snatched off the street as she walked home from school. I was seventeen, not twelve, thirteen, or fourteen like Maria, Crystal, Briana, Simone, Kei, Tionne, or thousands of other girls I meet, who are so young, so clearly children, so naive regardless of their supposed “street smarts” that it’s unconscionable that anyone could ever suggest that they deserved this or wanted it. I wasn’t lured by a pimp; in fact, I won’t meet mine till several months later. No one forced me, coerced me, or even pressured me. I made a choice. I reflect on this over the years, and struggle with the implications of this choice and what this makes me: stupid, loose, greedy, lazy, sluttish; the list of words I’ve used to judge myself goes on and on. I listen to myself try to help girls to forgive themselves and alleviate their profound sense of shame. “Whatever you thought you had to do to survive or to stay alive, it’s OK.” It’s easier, though, to see the girls’ age and circumstances and recognize that they didn’t have a choice than it is to see my own vulnerabilties and lack of choices. It’s only as I get older that I’m able to extend to myself the same grace and compassion that I freely give to the girls. Only later can I give my scared teenage self a break and understand with compassion for myself how the “choices” I made were limited by my age and circumstances, and my lack of insight about how hard it would be to leave after just a couple of weeks.
The question of choice impacts the way that domestically trafficked girls are viewed and treated by our society. Many people believe that girls “choose” this life, and while it is true that most girls are not kidnapped into the sex industry, to frame their actions as choice is at best misleading. It is clear from the experiences of girls that, while they may have acted in response to individual, environmental, and societal factors, this may not necessarily be defined as a choice. The
American Heritage Dictionary
describes the act of choosing as “to select from a number of possible alternatives; decide on and pick out.” Therefore in order for a choice to be a legitimate construct, you’ve got to believe that (a) you actually have possible alternatives, and (b) you have the capacity to weigh these alternatives against one another and decide on the best avenue. Commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls have neither—their choices are limited by their age, their family, their circumstances, and their inability to weigh one bad situation against another, given their developmental and emotional immaturity. Therefore the issue of choice has to be framed in three ways: age and age-appropriate responsibility, the type of choice, and the context of the choice.
The age factor is perhaps the most obvious reason that discussions about true “choice” are erroneous and unhelpful to the debate. There’s a reason that we have age limits and standards governing the “choices” that children and youth can make, from drinking to marrying to driving to leaving school, and it’s because as a society we recognize that there’s a difference between child/adolescent development and adult development.
This is also why the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and its reauthorizations in 2003, 2005, and 2008 have all supported a definition of child sex trafficking where children under the age of eighteen found in the commercial sex trade are considered to be victims of trafficking without requiring that they experienced “force, fraud, or coercion” to keep them there. For victims of sex trafficking ages eighteen and over, the law requires the “force, fraud, or coercion” standard. In defining the crime of sex trafficking, Congress created certain protections for children. It’s taken as a given that children and youth are operating from a different context, especially in light of age of consent laws.
Not only are choices these girls make shaped by external limitations decided by age, they’re also dictated by the psychological and emotional limitations that are adolescent development. In hindsight, as adults looking back on our teenage selves, we can recognize our own impulsivity, risk taking, our need for peer approval, our rebellion against our parents, our limited understanding of consequences—in short, all the characteristics that define being a teenager. Very few adults would honestly want to revisit the naïveté, vulnerability, and often flat-out ignorance of adolescence. Many parents don’t trust their own sixteen-year-old to drive their car, pick their own “good enough” friends, or stay home alone for the weekend without hosting a party. Yet interestingly, I’ve met lots and lots of adults who feel that a sixteen-year-old is completely mature enough to be considered fully capable of making the choice to be in the sex industry.
Given their age and psychological development, children and youth often make decisions that are not in their best interests, or that perhaps are unsafe. It’s an unwise choice to meet a stranger in person whom you’ve met only on MySpace, not brilliant decision making to get into someone’s car when you barely know them; nor is it a great idea to run away from home with six dollars in your pocket and nowhere to go. Yet none of these “choices” is the same thing as “choosing” to be in the commercial sex industry—even if they end up leading down that path. It can also be an unwise decision to go home with someone you’ve just met, particularly if you’ve been drinking, and yet making that decision in no way means that you “chose” to get raped.
The discussion about lack of choice based on age is not to suggest that teenage girls and young women are mindless, helpless, or totally without agency. One of the greatest joys of my work is getting to spend time every day with girls and young women who are smart, insightful, thoughtful, capable of real leadership, and have much to offer the world around them. Girls are capable of making choices—within a safe and healthy context, and with the safety nets of responsible, caring adults ensuring that those choices are age appropriate. Yet for most sexually exploited and trafficked girls, the safety nets aren’t there, and they are left choosing the lesser of two evils. Children who are abused or neglected at home cannot simply “choose” to go get a job, earn some money, and move out into a safer or more pleasant environment. In the mind of a child or teenager, running away from a bad situation may seem like the most logical option, yet it’s the context of the choice that’s most important. It’s a concept that seems clearer when applied to trafficking victims from other countries who are rarely presumed to have made “bad choices.” Some of these women are cognizant of the fact that they will be working in a brothel when they reach the United States, but they are in no way prepared for the brutalities that they will face, the slavery which they’ll endure, or the reality that they can’t just leave once they’ve earned enough money—no matter what they were originally told. Still others may enter into a “marriage” only to find out that they will be a sex slave. These victims, many of whom are adults, have made choices. But their choices must be seen in context. Most of them have little to no other legitimate options. Desperation and lack of options make for poor decision making, but provide ripe pickings for the traffickers. Their choices do not mean that they deserve to be trafficked, or want to be enslaved. In the same way, neither do the decisions that girls in the United States may make with the hopes of securing a better future, someone to love them, food and clothing, a sense of family, or a chance to escape their current abuse mean that they deserve, want, or choose the life that awaits them.
Nicole and I are working together on a writing exercise I’ve assigned about what she likes about herself. Not only is the entire concept tough for her to wrap her mind around, but she’s struggling with the writing. I know that she feels limited by her literacy skills and sees herself as stupid and worthless, so the exercise feels like a good way to figure out where exactly she’s at, skillwise, and to encourage her self-worth at the same time. It’s not going well. She can come up with only two things she likes about herself, her hair and her feet, so I give her ideas:
You’re kind
,
You’re funny
,
You’re a good friend
. She screws up her nose in disbelief at them all but with much prodding tries to write them down anyway. She writes slowly and carefully, putting a lot of thought into each word, and it quickly becomes clear that she has very little basic knowledge even of phonics and how letters combine to make different sounds. At nineteen, Nicole’s literacy skills are equivalent to those of a first grader. It’s obvious that she has a pronounced learning disability, and I’m angry that she was able to make it through to the sixth grade in the New York City public school system without anyone taking the time to help her build the most basic skills. I try to imagine how difficult it is for her to navigate a world surrounded by words that might as well be in Greek. I understand why she feels that being in the life is the only thing that she’s capable of doing. It’s hard to imagine a life of possibilities when she can’t even read a book, fill out a job application, or decipher a street sign.
Many girls, even in this country, are growing up in a society that does not provide real and viable opportunities for the future. At the same time, they’re living in a culture that increasingly teaches them that their worth and value are defined by their sexuality. Parallels can be found between girls in poverty in this country and girls in poverty internationally, as well as with girls growing up over one hundred years ago. In an article on the commercial sexual exploitation of girls and the abolitionist movement in Victorian England, author Deborah Gorham writes of a young woman who “allowed herself to be entrapped in a French brothel because life had given her little reason to believe that any genuinely satisfactory possibility existed for her. In a society that told a girl who had no possessions that her chastity, at least, was a ‘precious possession,’ some young girls might well have been led to believe that they might as well sell that possession to the highest bidder.” If the word
chastity
were replaced by
sexuality
or
body
, then this paragraph could easily have been written about commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls today in the United States.
With this in mind, the issue of choice must be carefully framed and understood in the context of the individual and cultural factors facing girls at risk. The sex industry may initially appear to provide a life of economic freedom, independence, and a secure future with someone who loves them, in contrast to the bleak futures that they may believe are their only alternatives. Selling sex may seem like a small price to pay, particularly for girls who have been abused and raped. Combine the power of media images of young women as sexual objects with the girls’ familial and environmental situations and the trap is set. It is often not until the reality of the situation begins to sink in, when the situation becomes too toxic or when she finally accepts the reality that her boyfriend is actually a pimp, that a girl may choose to leave. At that point it is no longer a matter of choice, but rather a matter of escape.
“You know what? I think it just got a little easier out here for a pimp.”
—Jon Stewart, Academy Awards, 2006
WINTER 1993, GERMANY
The guy who walks in toward the end of the afternoon shift is much younger than our usual lunchtime crew, but after a few instructive months of working in one of Munich’s largest strip clubs, I’ve learned not to be surprised by anything. Bella, the bar manager and my boss, gives him a disapproving look. She’s been working here for years and can sniff out money like a bloodhound on a fresh scent. To make matters worse, he looks “ethnic”—Turkish, Middle Eastern, perhaps Yugoslavian—which, according to Bella, means if he does have money, he’ll be cheap with it and possibly rough with the girls. I’ve already heard Bella’s lectures on the various sexual and financial proclivities of every race and ethnicity and know that her preference is for white businessmen in their forties or fifties, German or British, but not American (“too loud, too cheap”). Of course, her protests about us “girls” talking to the less desirable customers is disingenuous; she would have a fit if we actually didn’t try to make some money or didn’t quietly endure being roughed up. In this case, he’s the only customer and with only thirty minutes left before the shift ends, she sighs dramatically but gives me the nod to proceed. I sidle up next to him at the bar, and start my usual spiel—broken
Deutsch
(with an Asiatic twist, as I’m learning the language from the Filipina bar girls), topped off with an English accent.
“Vilcommen. Vee gates? Miena namee est Carmen.”