Authors: Rachel Lloyd
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.
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 Albert 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.
The gloom of this Christmas will be replayed for several years. Me and my mother sitting quietly on the dark brown couch. She: sunk deep in depression; me: sinking right along with her. By the next year, I’ll do whatever I can to not be at home for long. I’ll try to stay at a boyfriend’s, spend the day with his loud and raucous family, craving to feel included in someone else’s home. People who know about my situation will feel sorry for me and will invite me over. I’ll feel awkward but grateful and will always do the dishes, play with the kids, try to make myself a useful and thoughtful guest. Later, my mother will meet and marry a new man. It’s probably not fun to have your teenage daughter around your new spouse and I’ll be excluded from these Christmases. I won’t want to spend them with her anyway but somehow I’ll still feel jealous. Her happy holidays seem to be spent with someone else; on her sad ones, I’m expected to be there.
The silence of those Christmases, the sense that our family was irreparably broken, will stay with me. I grow to dread Christmas, and all that the holiday season represents. As I get older, I adopt my mother’s trick of getting so drunk throughout the day that with any luck I would be semiconscious or dead asleep for the majority of the day and night, waking up only on Boxing Day. One year, when I’m living alone in a studio in Germany, I buy enough weed, alcohol, and cigarettes to last me three days, and proceed to get as wasted as I can so that I literally have no memory of the holiday, except for the buying of said substances and the recovery period several days later.
My mother eventually gets sober and much later I finally do, and we struggle as adults to work on our fractured relationship. Yet for many years, the holidays, Christmas, and even my birthday are just an inconvenient reminder of my family, my lack of family, a reminder of the type of family I always wanted. I come to love Thanksgiving, as it’s not a holiday that England celebrates and so there are no painful childhood memories associated with it. I can create my own Thanksgiving memories and over time I’ll figure out how to tolerate, if not embrace, Christmas without getting totally trashed. Coming to terms with my family, forgiving, and letting go take a little bit longer.
Growing up I believed that everyone had a pain quota, i.e., you could experience only a certain amount of pain and tragedy in your life before that quota was filled. In general, this meant suffering early in life was rewarded by a relatively pain-free and peaceful existence as an adult and enjoying a trouble-free childhood and adolescence meant that you were likely to get your pain quota later in life. As I looked at girls at my school whose lives seemed so neat, so foreign, so perfect, I comforted myself with the knowledge that my approved pain limit would soon be reached and that they’d experience their drama later. It seemed only fair and logical that everyone was meted out a level of hardship; some people’s pain just came earlier in life, but I was confident that eventually it would come to an end.
When I first moved to the Bronx, a friend told me of a woman who lived nearby who had buried all five of her children. Two of her sons had perished in freak accidents in the same elevator shaft, never properly repaired, several years apart. A daughter had been murdered by a boyfriend, another son had died in a motorcycle accident, her last daughter had died of a drug overdose. I was stunned. I understood that burying a child had to be one of the most painful experiences in life, but burying five, one after the other, each time thinking your heart couldn’t break anymore? It was so unfathomable; it seemed like an urban legend. How could one person possibly suffer that much? There was no moral to be learned, no great blessing at the end of it. She wasn’t a bad person; there was no cosmic karma, just a string of mindless tragedies that seemed to directly contradict the biblical edict that the Lord wouldn’t give you more than you could bear. My theory was shot to pieces. If there was a quota for pain and suffering, someone had forgotten to tell a grieving mother in the Bronx.
My pain-quota theory didn’t work out too well either with the young girls I was meeting in New York. There were moments where the litany of pain, abusive adults, and just downright awful luck seemed almost unbelievable. “So, you were there when your father stabbed your mother, and then you went to live with your aunt, but she was getting high and she fell asleep smoking and the apartment caught on fire, so then you went into the system and the brother in your first foster family abused you and then you ran away and the first night you were on the street you met a man, who then later became your pimp?”
As I heard more and more accounts like these, I learned that these weren’t fantastical tales but the norm for girls whose entire lives had been punctuated with crisis, trauma, and abuse. Statistics, presented without the faces, the stories, the tears, couldn’t even begin to measure the severity or frequency of the trauma these girls were experiencing. Girls who’d been sexually abused by every male in their family, girls who were orphaned by their parent’s murder/suicide/death from AIDS who would then be abused in the system, girls who had only known the touch of an adult to be sexual or violent, girls for whom the concept of love, family, care, bore little resemblance to most people’s definitions. Girls who had long ago exceeded whatever could be considered a reasonable quota for pain.