Girls Like Us (26 page)

Sonia, who has sat down, begins to rise. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot, honey.” Any moment now. I’m waiting for the explosion.

“It’s OK, babe, I’ll make it myself, don’t worry about it,” says David, and with that he smiles, rubs her shoulder, and trots off to the kitchen to make it himself.

I’m stunned. Sonia is acting like everything is normal, but I’m having a hard time figuring this out. What just happened? What happened to the explosion, the anger, the disgust with her forgetfulness? I try to hold it, knowing somewhere in my head that my question is about to sound marginally crazy, but I need an answer.

“Why he didn’t hit you?” I whisper, worried David will hear.

“Huh?” Sonia is confused.

“I mean”—frustrated that she’s not getting the obvious—“why didn’t you get in trouble over the tea, why didn’t he yell at you or something?”

Sonia looks like she wants to laugh, but when she realizes that I’m serious, she looks horrified.

“Oh, sweetie. That’s not how we do things in this house. Ever. That’s not how people should ever treat each other.” Now she just looks sad.

“Oh, OK.” I feel bad that I’ve upset her and realize that I’ve betrayed exactly what I’ve been trying so hard to hide. I’m embarrassed.

David comes back in with a tea for himself and one for me and one for her. This is just too much. He must be the nicest man on the planet. I’m completely thrown off.

Sonia, guessing that we probably need to discuss this whole “Why doesn’t he hit you?” thing a little more, tells him we’re going into the kitchen for some girl talk. We spend the rest of the afternoon talking about love and abuse and how they’re not the same thing. While I think I probably know this intellectually, at nineteen it’s the first time that I’ve ever really begun to believe it. Putting this realization into practice will take a few more years.

Most women have been in a relationship that they know is no good for them. Your friends and family know it is no good for you, but you’re too besotted to see straight. It may take a few attempts, some late-night crying sessions, some serious talking to from your girlfriends, but eventually you’re able to leave and look back with a mixture of regret and disbelief that you put up with that person for so long. The relationship may not have been physically abusive, but bad relationships can fall anywhere on a continuum, from the guy who doesn’t call when he says he will to the guy who has a wandering eye to the guy who cheats with your college roommate. At the far end of this continuum are the men (or women) who are emotionally or physically abusive. Your boundaries or tolerance for an unhealthy relationship often depends on what you’re used to, what the deal breakers are for you, where that invisible line falls. Some girls and women have a higher tolerance for pain, mostly because they’ve experienced it in various forms growing up. Some women have no idea what to expect from a relationship because they never saw a healthy one modeled. Many children grow up watching violence play out in their families, setting the stage for later dating and relational patterns. Sadly, this is even more common than we like to admit, as one in four women in this country will experience physical violence from a partner at some point in their lives.

Chris Brown’s attack on Rihanna was perhaps the most public example of dating violence for young women. Yet instead of the incident provoking a thoughtful national dialogue, it showed how entrenched attitudes still are about where the responsibility for violence lies. I was horrified by the response on many of the message boards, blogs, and even by some of the celebrities who initially tried to downplay Chris Brown’s culpability. Message after message not believing her, blaming her, excusing Brown’s actions along the lines of “she must’ve done
something
to deserve it.” A survey carried out by the Boston Public Heath Commission a few weeks after the attack found that almost half of the two hundred teenagers interviewed thought Rihanna was responsible for her alleged beating at the hands of Chris Brown. Only 51 percent thought Brown was responsible for the incident, and 52 percent said both individuals were to blame for the incident, despite knowing at the time that Rihanna had been beaten badly enough to require hospital treatment. Forty-four percent of the teenagers thought that physical fighting was a normal part of a relationship.

Clearly, then, it’s not just girls who’ve experienced trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation who believe that violence is normal. Even now, thirty-plus years into the domestic violence movement, too many girls and young women are still taught to accept gender-based violence.

It is well known that Chris Brown grew up witnessing domestic violence. While on some level he knows it’s wrong, on many levels it just feels normal. So too is it normal for girls who have witnessed domestic violence or experienced physical abuse from their family members or “caregivers.” In addition to any exposure to unhealthy family dynamics, girls, especially girls of color, are growing up in a culture that glorifies violence and frequently implicitly and explicitly devalues and sexualizes them. Domestic violence is also often framed as a result of uncontrollable passion, leading girls to believe that men who don’t hit are apathetic and uncaring. It’s not surprising that so many teenage girls accept violence as a part of their relationships—violence as a demonstration of love.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon at the office and I’m talking to Tyria, who lives in our housing program, about her inability to keep curfew. She’s turning around and around on a swivel chair while I talk to her. It’s clearly not a conversation that she’s thrilled to be having. For our girls, curfew is a constant challenge; they are used to coming home in the early hours of the morning and sleeping all day. They’re also teenagers who need space to be teenagers, to mess up, to break the rules. And yet we still try to maintain order and boundaries for the whole house, all the while recognizing and addressing the trauma that has led our girls to be there in the first place. Even though keeping curfew is not high on Tyria’s to-do list, it is a priority on ours.

“So, what’s going on with you right now? Not doing so great with this curfew thing, huh?”

Tyria mumbles that she has a hard time following the rules, which I adamantly agree with. I give her the standard response about the importance of rules in the house, but feel as though there’s something else going on for her around this issue.

“Why do you think you’re having such a hard time with the rules? You’re doing pretty well in other areas; you’re doing great in school.” By great, I mean that she’s actually attended class for ten consecutive days. Baby steps.

Tyria shrugs. “I dunno. It’s like y’all too soft.”

“Really?” I’m surprised to hear this; earlier she’d been complaining about how strict the rules were. “You were upset though that we’d placed you on an earlier curfew, right, so I’m not sure that I totally understand what you’re asking for.”

“Y’all should hit me. If you just hit me, I’d listen and follow the rules and stuff,” she says.

I feel tired and sad, looking at this little girl twisting back and forth and fidgeting around in a rolling chair, a child who’s asking to be hit—who believes that this is how she’ll learn to “act right.”

“Ty, honey, we don’t do that and we won’t ever do that. Not just because it’s against the law, but because we don’t want to. Ever. We believe that you shouldn’t be hit, that you should be protected. That’s why you’re at GEMS, to be safe and not hurt.”

She looks skeptical.

“Why do you think it would help for you to be hit?”

“Because I’m hardheaded and when I get hit, then afterward I listen. I need it sometimes; I act better then.”

“Did someone tell you that?”

“Yeah, my ex.” At GEMS, you don’t really need to add the word
pimp
onto
ex
; it’s a given. “He said I needed it to act right. He didn’t do it all the time, just when I was wildin out and needed it, but afterward I did what I was supposed to. It’s just discipline. It’s not bad.”

I picture her subdued and compliant after a beating. Of course she did what she was told. You don’t have that much fight in you after a beating. It’s the calm after the storm. If anything, you try harder, act sweeter, and feel more attached than ever. This behavior would of course prove his theory that she “needed” to get hit. I’d heard the same line myself many times.

I ask her about the times she “acted up” and what she thought she’d done to deserve it. She cites the heinous crimes of being mean to one of her wives-in-law, getting jealous, not making enough money, forgetting to do something he’d asked her to do.

Tyria’s a bright, no-nonsense girl, so I figure we’ll use some logic to take each incident apart and try to explore the notion of what “deserving” it really means.

“So, let me get this straight, you’re in love with him, right?”

She nods vigorously.

“And he’s sleeping with another girl and you get jealous? That’s pretty normal, though, right? I know I’d be mad jealous. I might even say something slick. You’ve got the right to feel jealous, he’s hurting your feelings. But then you’re the one that gets beaten up?”

She catches on quickly and starts smiling. “OK, so it wasn’t that bad what I did, but still. . . .” She’s not sure how to justify this one.

“OK, how about the money thing. . . . He’s selling you, you’re the one that’s out there in danger, having to put in all the grind, while he’s in his car chillin, and he’s mad at you for not making enough money?” I mimic him posted up in his car, doing nothing.

Tyria’s laughing now. She knows it sounds a little off. It just
feels
so logical. “OK, OK, so I didn’t do a lot of bad things but it did make me act better.” Her need for “discipline” has been drummed into her so hard that even though a part of her brain knows that she probably shouldn’t get beaten up, in her heart she remains otherwise convinced. We talk for a while about abuse and love, about hitting and deserving and the concept of healthy, safe consequences for her behavior at the house. I can see it sinking in just a little on the surface, but still barely penetrating her core beliefs. Somehow we get to the subject of how she met her pimp and she mentions in an offhand way that she met him the night she ran away from home, trying to escape her mother’s violent rages and extension cord beatings. Apparently her mother also believed she “needed” to get beaten in order to behave. It’s not really surprising that Tyria wants us to hit her. That’s her baseline for normal. Boundaries, respect, unconditional love are not. Neither is it surprising to me, although still upsetting, that a few weeks after this conversation, Tyria goes back to what feels normal, where she understands the rules and consequences and knows exactly what to expect.

In the language of sociology, a subculture comes replete with rules and norms, a common language and social mores. This is true for the culture of domestic trafficking. Pimps use mind control and domination to teach girls the norms and mores of “the game,” building on the core values and beliefs that have been ingrained in them since childhood. Many people often think that sexually exploited girls want freedom, but even if that’s true for a few, what they find is a level of control and structure in their new lives that is far greater than anything they ever experienced at home. It’s precisely the freedom from that control that can be incredibly frightening for girls in the beginning of their recovery. If a pimp feels like an anchor, then leaving feels like being cut adrift in a world where the rules aren’t always clear and the consequences don’t always make sense. Just as ex–cult members need deprogramming after leaving an abusive cult, there’s a lot of unlearning to do once girls escape the commercial sex industry. Their attitudes and core beliefs have to be reframed. Their boundaries are so blurred and distorted that even once girls get the basic concept that violence is not OK under any circumstances, it can still be a struggle for them to develop healthy boundaries in intimate relationships and in friendships. Commercially sexually exploited girls are used to giving and giving and giving—taking care of their pimps, taking care of their johns’ “needs”—an ingrained pattern that often goes back to childhood when they took care of family members, whether it was younger siblings or parents. Most girls struggle with codependency in and out of the life, and it can take a while to stop being the caretaker. Even their relationship with money is distorted. Money, love, and sex have all become entangled, and girls often have a tough time setting limits on giving money to needy family members, and especially needy boyfriends, even when they’re barely making ends meet themselves. For girls who’re used to seeing but not keeping large amounts of money, it’s hard to adjust to getting paid biweekly and making less in a week than she made, for him, in one night. Trafficked girls, and girls who’ve grown up in poverty, haven’t had much opportunity to think about the future, let alone plan for it financially. It can be very tough for them to save money. When I first started making a salary, I was so convinced that I was going to lose it soon anyway that I frittered and gave it away like it was tap water. Helping girls develop a healthier relationship with money, seeing it as something neutral and showing them that people can make money doing something they actually enjoy, is an important step in helping them unlearn old patterns.

When your self-identity has been tied up in how much money you can make and how many men want “you,” it can feel scary to not have any of those things left to define you. So many girls have told me, “I don’t think I’m good at anything else,” and within their words, I hear their fear that this is their destiny, what they were made for.
Once a ho, always a ho
, and
Can’t turn a ho into a housewife
are phrases that stick in your brain. When you’ve been told the same thing for years by your family and every adult man you’ve ever met, and society’s attitude confirms it, why wouldn’t you believe that this is who you are and all you’ll ever be? Undoing these lies is like unraveling a twisted ball of yarn; each distorted belief leads to another.