Girls Like Us (19 page)

The difference in attitudes toward women and girls of color plays out inside the cop cars and the courtrooms and also in the way a case plays out in public. To get media attention, law enforcement and the justice system prioritize victims and hold news conferences that they know will get coverage. Understanding how to play the game includes understanding which cases no one cares about.

It’s not exactly news anymore to point out the disparity in the media’s coverage of victims, yet it is important to understand how this impacts domestically trafficked girls and young women. Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, and Laci Peterson are probably the best-known examples of how victims who are white, attractive, middle class, and with no “history” are given top priority by the national news media. This bias extends to children, too. Consider JonBenét Ramsey, Caylee Anthony, Haleigh Cummings, and Madeleine McCann, all white children. In a
Guardian
article about the disparity of coverage in missing persons cases, Martin Bright states, “There are certain rules in the missing persons game. Don’t be a boy, don’t be working class, don’t be black. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drug problems, forget it. . . .”

It’s not just that the media’s approach to victims is unfair and disparate. It is. But the real consequences come from the media’s impact on how law enforcement resources are allocated, whose case is given priority, and the impact upon public perception. It makes a difference in whether your disappearance gets copters and dogs or flyers. It makes a difference in how you’re treated by a jury of “your peers.” It makes a difference in whether you or your family members are believed or taken seriously. In over a decade of working with thousands of girls, most of whom have been missing at some point, many of whom were literally kidnapped and held by force, I have never seen a GEMS case that has gotten an Amber Alert.

Few people outside of the Milwaukee area have heard of Alexis Patterson. On May 3, 2002, the seven-year-old girl disappeared without a trace. Just a few weeks later in Utah, another little girl disappeared, taken from her bedroom window. Her story would garner national, nonstop coverage, and there are few people in this country who are unfamiliar with Elizabeth Smart. The
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
roundly criticized the national media for its bias and lack of coverage of the Patterson case, noting, “A Nexis search of major newspapers and magazines shows 67 stories about Patterson, almost all of them by the Associated Press and the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
. In the last week, there have been more than 400 stories about Smart.” Even the
New York Times
, which had not covered the story on Alexis until it was criticized for its lack of response, noted in its only article on the case, “It would have been difficult this morning to argue against the parents’ assertion that the Smart case had drawn far more news media attention than their daughter’s. As the couple sat in their living room with their television tuned to MSNBC, two reports on the Smart case were shown within an hour, even as the ticker carried the message, ‘Elizabeth Smart has been missing for three weeks.’ ” Alexis Patterson, like Diamond and Tionda Bradley, Teekah Lewis, Jahi Turner, and other missing children of color whom few people have heard about, has never been found.

Another stark example of the media bias is the divergent coverage of the murder of two adolescent girls, Tyisha McCoy and Brittney Gregory, in the New York City tristate area in 2004. While both girls had turbulent childhoods and both had been left by their substance-abusing mothers in the care of another family member, the accounts of their short lives and even their murders were treated very differently by the New York press. Tyisha, a thirteen-year-old black girl living in Harlem, was murdered by a man she had met on a teen chat line. Upon the discovery of a diary, headlines such as
Slain Teen’s Sex Logs
abounded as she was described by newspapers as “wild” and “precocious.” The
Daily News
, in classic victim-blaming prose, stated that “her precociousness may have contributed to her death.”

Just a few weeks later, sixteen-year-old Brittney Gregory, who was white, was found murdered a few miles from her New Jersey home. Brittney, who was on her way to visit her boyfriend at the time, was spared the titillating headlines and dissection of her sexuality, and instead was described as “fun-loving,” “sweet,” and “caring” by the same newspaper. These public eulogies of two adolescent girls demonstrate the long-held public perception that black girls are “faster,” looser, more precocious, and more promiscuous than their white counterparts, echoing the hypersexual Jezebel stereotype of the slavery era.

Domestically trafficked girls don’t need their sexual histories to be imputed. It’s there: in their records of arrests for prostitution, in the clothing that they are picked up wearing, in their case records marking them as chronic runaways. Throw in a lower-class background, a history with foster care or a single-parent home, and add to that being a girl of color, especially black, and you’ve hit a trifecta of sexuality, class, and race that will ensure that your credibility is doubted, that your victimization is disbelieved, and that you will be marked an unacceptable victim. In fact, it’s much easier to see you as a criminal.

In 2004, a twelve-year-old girl, Nicolette, was charged with an act of prostitution. She decides to take her case to trial. She’s assigned a Legal Aid attorney, Cait Mullen, who is a staunch advocate for commercially sexually exploited girls. Cait decides that as Nicolette is still five years away from being able to legally consent to sex, she can build a strong case in her defense, one that could set a precedent for the many preadolescent and adolescent girls who are being charged with prostitution. Cait and I talk excitedly about the groundbreaking case, believing that Nicolette will be treated, rightfully, as a victim.

Yet Nicolette, who ran away from a shelter at eleven to be with her pimp and is reluctant to testify against him, is not seen as a good victim. The
New York Times
stated, “The lanky and sour Nicolette did not cut a terribly sympathetic figure to some in court. There was also no evidence besides her word that any abuse she described had taken place.” Yet the writer went on in the next paragraph to contradict her point: “No one argued, though, that she had suffered—either at the hands of her family or her pimp. A physical examination of Nicolette turned up burns from a hot iron and cigarettes as well as a recently broken rib.”

The judge, like the writer, did not find Nicolette particularly sympathetic. So despite her age, the fact that she was under the control of an adult man, that she cannot legally consent to sex, and that there was overwhelmingly clear evidence of child abuse, the judge sentences Nicolette to a year in a juvenile detention center because she needs to learn “proper moral principles.” While Cait and I are furious at the judge’s decision, we know that he’s well within his rights under the law. Cait files appeal after appeal until the appellate court sends back the decision: The court won’t dismiss the case in the interests of justice; this is an issue to take up with the New York State legislature.

Cait and I, along with a small group of other advocates, realize that the only way to change things will be to change state law. It feels like a David versus Goliath battle, but there’s no other way to redress the injustices that the girls face daily. The change needs to be systemic and it needs to be permanent. It’s obvious to us that girls shouldn’t be locked up for something that’s been done to them, and we’ll spend the next four and a half years trying to convince the legislature to agree. In the meantime, I hope and pray with each girl that they get a “good” cop, a supportive judge, an understanding prosecutor. There are too many girls like Nicolette who just don’t get that lucky.

I’m dreaming that the phone is ringing. It takes another two minutes for me to realize that the phone is actually ringing about three inches from my head. It’s Carol, an NYPD detective we work with regularly. The light on the cell phone tells me it’s 2:45 a.m. I know this is probably not going to be good news.

“Yo.” Carol’s voice is booming and wired.

“Hey.” I’m slurring and groggy.

“Guess who’s fuckin sitting here with me?”

I sit up. Clearly it’s someone I know. And if they’re sitting with a cop in the middle of the night, there’s a limited number of explanations for it.

“I have no idea.” Although to be honest I have a whole lot of ideas; there are many possibilities for who it could be.

“Motherfuckin Nikki.” Carol has never met a curse word she didn’t like. Nikki has been through a string of previous arrests and has just turned sixteen. I’m lucid enough now to know that this means she’s headed to Rikers. “Shit, Raych, you know I don’t want to fuckin take the girl in.”

I know she doesn’t. Carol is one of the few cops who doesn’t think that girls should go to jail for being sold.

“I’m supposed to fuckin book her, but if there was someone willing to act as a guardian?” She leaves the question in the air.

“Of course; meet me at my office?” I’m out of bed and throwing on sweats and sneakers.

“What’s your ETA?”

“Huh? Oh, I can be there in fifteen.”

I call Nikki’s case manager, and we go through the same groggy-to-alert-in-five-seconds performance. She’ll call Nikki’s sister to see if she is willing to be the guardian.

By the time Carol and another detective, Ron, get there, I’ve already opened the office and have my ever-present cup of tea in my hand. Nikki trails in looking sheepish and then shocked to see me in my sweats and wild hair. I’m saddened, but not shocked, to see her wearing very little. She looks like a little girl playing a freakish type of dress-up in her mommy’s clothes, and it’s freezing outside. I go straight to the donation closet and rummage around until I find a huge sweatshirt and some leggings.

“Hey, hon.” I give her a little squeeze on the shoulders; Nikki has never really been one for the hug.

“You look crazy.”

“Um, yeah, thanks for that.”

Carol laughs. “She’s right. You look a fuckin mess, Raych; what happened? Got dressed in the dark?”

“Yeah, actually I did.” I’m laughing. “Whatever, you don’t look so hot yourself. What happened? Forty-eight-hour shift?”

“You fuckin know it.”

Carol and I banter for a few more minutes while Nikki goes to get changed in the bathroom. It had taken me a while to get past some of my long-held prejudices about cops, but I’ve grown to appreciate Carol and her profane, no-bullshit, but deeply compassionate approach. She’d even brought candy and cuddly toys for the girls at Easter. Beneath all that hard-ass, cursing, quintessential New York City cop routine was a hard-ass, cursing, quintessential New York City cop who happened to really care about the girls. She knew, as I did, that yet another spell in jail was not going to address the needs of this sixteen-going-on-nine-year-old girl who had been on the streets since she was twelve. We wait for the case manager and Nikki’s sister to arrive. I know that Nikki won’t be able to stay with her sister for too long; if she could, she’d already be there. But at least it buys us time to figure out some options and hopefully get her some support and services. At the very least, Nikki has had an experience with a cop who treated her with dignity and respect, who saw her as a person and tried to get her some real help. I know that moments like this can have a real impact on girls. When compassion and belief in your potential comes from a cop, a judge, a prosecutor, an FBI agent, or some other unexpected source, it can feel so significant. Even if it doesn’t make an impression on Nikki, it doesn’t really matter. It was still the right thing to do.

Over the years, I’d work with Adam, Jimmy, Mike, and a handful of other cops who’d give me a broadened perspective on law enforcement, and as I traveled I found that most cities had their own Carol or Adam. In Dallas there was Byron; in Boston, Kelly; in Atlanta, Ernest; in Chicago, Tom. Cops who believed that girls are the victims, and pimps and johns the bad guys, and treated girls accordingly. These are the cops who visited girls on the weekends just to check in, who sat on the phone and listened to a girl vent, who came running when girls were in trouble, who scoured the streets night after night looking for a missing girl, who saw the girls as children no different from their own. These were cops that girls came to trust and count on, cops that they did talk to and often worked with to make a case against the pimps. These cops learned that there was a different way of doing their job and that it worked better. But these officers definitely weren’t representative of the larger law enforcement community, and there weren’t enough of them. The problem was systemic but the response was individual, based on a few caring people and their personal outrage at the selling and trafficking of children. Over the years, little has changed. There are undoubtedly good cops coming into the system, but there’s still much of the same apathy and outright disdain for the girls that has, by and large, characterized law enforcement’s response to this issue. In the minds of most cops, there are girls, probably foreign, who may be victims of trafficking. and then there girls who are “prostitutes,” teen prostitutes perhaps, but prostitutes nonetheless.

It’s well known in law enforcement circles that cops throughout the country have used the moniker
NHI
(no humans involved) to describe cases involving homeless people, addicts, drug dealers, and rapes and murders involving women and girls in the sex industry. At a training conference on the West Coast I mention this police jargon in my presentation, being careful to make it clear that I’m not suggesting any of the cops in the room would use that type of language. At the break, one of the cops comes up to me. “They call it the trash run,” he says.

It takes me a minute to get what he’s talking about. “Picking up the girls?”

“Yeah.” He looks embarrassed.

I think about the girls I know and love.
Trash run.
And the cops wondered why girls didn’t just ask for help.