Girls Like Us (28 page)

Bradley has caught the tail end of the argument, and knows that something offensive has been said. Once we’re outside, away from the White House, I finally start crying. I’m so upset that this will be my memory of this historic White House visit. I vent for a while to Bradley, and then to a few other people on the phone on the train back from D.C. By the time I’m back in New York, I’ve exhausted most of my anger but I’m still bothered that I’m bothered. I know that most people don’t look at me and automatically think of my past, and I know that very few people get an invitation to meet a sitting president, but still, I’m hurt. Despite all my accomplishments, despite the momentous nature of the event, all this person saw was my past. Nothing I did, no one I met, would erase the fact that in his eyes, I was still a former prostitute.

It is rare that I have to feel the sting of that judgment anymore. An ex-boyfriend once threw it in my face during an argument years before; a couple of guys never returned my calls as soon as they found out; there was the occasional insensitive remark at a party where people were unaware of my role; and of course the White House incident. Yet in many ways my openness about my past insulates me. It is in my bio, on the GEMS website, in every Google search of me. I am in a field that values the fact that I am a “survivor”—it gives me, I’ve been told, a level of credibility that few other people in the field possess. It was frustrating initially and then ultimately unacceptable to be billed as a “former prostitute” at a conference, yet with the girls, my experiences allow me to empathize with them, and to give them hope.

That said, when Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York was busted by a press corps all but visibly salivating over every lascivious detail and fascinated with this entrée into the world of escort agencies and high-priced call girls, the pressure was intense. The sheer volume of cover story headlines featuring the word
hooker
, and the opinions, jokes, and comments that dominated the coverage, the vast majority of which alternately sneered at or lusted after (and sometimes both in the same piece) the young woman who had been bought by then-governor Spitzer, was both shaming and saddening for me and for the girls every morning when we went to buy our bagels and tea.

By the millionth insensitive and rude call that week from the press, I’d had enough. I wanted to lay down the eight-hundred-pound elephant that sat on my neck. The
p
word, the image of a “fallen woman” that inspired scorn and derision, judgment, and often titillation was the last thing I wanted to be identified with. I thought of what a girl in my weekly group had said. “I don’t care what you call it, Rachel, sexual exploitation and all that, but to everyone else, we still hos.” That week, I felt she was right.

About a week later, another scandal broke that both fascinated and disturbed me. A young memoirist named Margaret B. Jones, who’d claimed a biracial heritage and a hard-knocks childhood in the mean streets of South Central LA, was exposed as a privileged white woman who’d grown up in the rather kind streets of San Fernando Valley. As I watched the story unfold, there was a part of me that felt a little jealous of Ms. “Jones.” The luxury of being able to say, “I was just joking; oops, I lied. I was never in the life. In fact I grew up in a great two-parent home, graduated from high school, and went to Oxford, where I decided that to be taken seriously as an advocate for exploited kids, it would be better to create a dramatic backstory.” I obsessed over this alternate scenario for several days and imagined conversations with people in the field. How would they respond? Had everything I’d accomplished been judged all along in the context of “She’s done so well considering where she came from”?

I toyed with the idea of my imaginary résumé, made jokes about it to a few friends. But beneath the jokes, the yearning to be able to just close the door completely, once and for all, on that chapter of my life was overwhelmingly powerful. If only I could excise the memories, the pain, the having to experience the judgment of other people, the having to “have the conversation” with a boyfriend when you felt the relationship was getting serious, the being a “former” anything. I’d always said that I didn’t regret anything and that everything I’ve been through had made me who I am, but that week I couldn’t shake the strong desire to simply make my experiences an imaginary world that I had created inside my head. A chapter that I could unwrite.

The term
prostitute
conjures up so many images, all of them negative. The other words to describe women and girls in the sex industry aren’t much better. Growing up, I was enamored of Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman
, yet I wanted the fairy-tale red dress and diamond necklace part, not the being seen as a hooker, ho, whore, prostitute part. Even when I was working in the club and giving my money to a man, I strenuously objected to the term
prostitute
, so conscious was I of all the baggage and stigma that accompanied it, preferring instead neutral terms like
hostess
,
dancer
, and the German term
anime.
Even as I later came to accept the realities of my involvement in the commercial sex industry, I still couldn’t wrap my brain around calling a thirteen-year-old or a fifteen-year-old a prostitute. It denoted a level of choice that just wasn’t true. Yet it was the most polite term that I heard girls called when I first came to New York. The word was frequently almost spat out of the speaker’s mouth, as if there would be some type of contamination just by saying it.

It was at a youth summit for survivors in Canada in 1998 that I first heard the terminology
commercially sexually exploited child/youth
, a phrase that, while long and challenging initially, spoke most accurately to the experiences and realities of children and youth within the sex industry. It was a phrase that had been adopted by the United Nations and UNICEF and was largely accepted by many practitioners in the international children’s rights field. These, however, weren’t the people who most sexually exploited children were running into on a daily basis. It was the cops, the social workers, the nurses, the guidance counselors, the family members, the neighbors, the siblings, the judges, the correctional officers who were scornfully calling girls “prostitutes” and treating them accordingly.

One of the statements that we drafted in the Declaration and Agenda for Action at the summit that week was, “We declare that the term
child or youth prostitute
can no longer be used. These children and youth are sexually exploited and any language or reference to them must reflect this belief.”

I took this declaration to heart and embraced the terminology for myself and for the girls I worked with. It was clear to me that changing the language would be an integral part of the GEMS mission and philosophy and, over the years, I have argued vehemently for language change, often carefully correcting anyone who misspeaks.

“I’m writing an article on teen prostitutes.”

“Oh, you mean commercially sexually exploited youth?”

“No, girls in prostitution.”

“Yes, you do mean commercially sexually exploited girls.”

“Oh . . . uh, yeah, I guess.”

Constantly reframing the issue and changing the language has been imperative in changing public perception and sympathies. It’s been a battle particularly with people in the media who feel that using the term
commercially sexually exploited
will confuse their audience. One reporter refused to change his terminology, saying that he felt that the term was “euphemistic.” We debated for a while on how
sexually exploited
could possibly be considered euphemistic when it accurately described what actually happened to children and youth, whereas
child prostitute
seemed to denote
who
the child was as opposed to what was being done
to
her. In his article, he went ahead and called them “teen prostitutes” anyway, failing perhaps to understand that it wasn’t a question of semantics, that words, names, terminology really do matter.

In my weekly recovery group, inspired, sadly enough, by the pivotal confrontation scene in
Good Will Hunting,
I’ve decided to discuss the issue of things being “not your fault.” We have a lively discussion and I feel like we are making some progress in addressing the issues of blame, and the accompanying shame, that the girls all carry in relation to their past. As usual, I assign homework, trying to get the things we’ve talked about for an hour and a half to stick even a little. This week’s assignment is a writing exercise starting with “They said it was my fault when . . .” I’m hoping that the few girls who actually do the writing will be able to separate the judgment of other people from their own feelings of guilt and unworthiness.

A few days later, Toni comes in subdued, which is uncharacteristic. She works hard to laugh loudly and smile frequently, yet her tears are rarely far from the surface. She carries the shame of her experiences like a heavy weight and gets little support at home. When Toni’s mother is drunk she will repeatedly spell out the word
prostitute
, particularly in front of Toni’s friends and new boyfriend, who are unaware of her experiences. Toni told her boyfriend that her mother was spelling out
prostate
as she was concerned about a family member having cancer. I’d been impressed with her quick thinking.

Today it’s clear that something’s wrong. I pat the couch next to me and she plops herself down with a sigh. “What’s going on, T?”

“You know that homework you gave us? I wrote mad stuff about everything I went through, like six pages, when I got raped, being in the life, and how people blamed me. I wrote a bunch and it felt good to get it out of my system.”

“That’s good, hon.” I want to be more enthusiastic but something’s telling me there’s more to come.

“Well, my brother found it.”

“Oh.” I wince. I know this isn’t going to be good.

“He went nuts. Just wilded out on me, cussing me out like crazy and just grabbed me up calling me a dirty ho, a slut, shit like that. The he just started punching me mad times in my face and my head. Look. . . .” She turns her head and lifts up her hair so I can see the lumps left by his rage.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie.” I really am.

Toni starts to cry. “I just kept asking him why couldn’t he understand what happened, why couldn’t he see that it wasn’t my fault, but he just kept yelling and hitting me.”

She’s crushed. Even though she knows that his reaction was wrong, all it’s done is reinforce her feelings of guilt and shame. I feel awful. We talk for a long time about her brother’s response, her own understanding that she didn’t deserve what happened, that she’s not to blame. While it calms her down a little, I know that I’m not the one she wants absolution from. She wants to hear it from her mother, her big brother, her friends, her boyfriend, because she’s still not convinced that getting raped by an adult when she was fifteen wasn’t her fault and that getting recruited by a pimp from a group home at sixteen wasn’t her fault. She wants to hear from them that she’s not a dirty, disgusting ho, though I’m guessing it will take a long time before that’s going to happen. In the meantime, GEMS is her surrogate family, and so we have to keep telling her over and over until slowly it begins to sink in that this was something that happened
to
her. It’s not who she is.

In 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act defined sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act where such an act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained eighteen years of age.” Under federal law, there was no need to prove “force, fraud, or coercion” if the victim was under the age of eighteen. There was nothing in the bill that defined these victims as exclusively foreign-born and brought into the United States, so there was some excitement among those of us who were advocates and service providers that domestic girls and women would finally be treated as victims. Yet the implementation and funding of the law left domestic victims out in the cold, and for many years we encountered a frustrating two-tiered system of those who were seen as “real” trafficking victims—internationally trafficked children and women—and those who were seen as “child/teen prostitutes”—girls and young women from the United States. Slowly, the tide has begun to shift and the movement has begun to recognize and, more important, name American girls under the control of a pimp as victims of domestic trafficking.

Identifying any child or youth, girls, boys, or transgendered youth under the age of eighteen in the commercial sex industry as commercially sexually exploited is critical in ensuring that all children and youth who are bought for commercial sex acts are recognized as exploited, even if their experiences don’t fall under the definition of trafficking. A sixteen-year-old who trades sex for shelter, or a seventeen-year-old girl who works in a strip club, is commercially sexually exploited; those under the control of a third-party exploiter, i.e., a pimp, are victims of domestic trafficking. Accurately describing the experiences of children and youth in the sex industry is critical to reframing the conversation and shaping public perception and public policy, and most important, goes toward removing the shame and stigma from the victims themselves.

The term “sex work” was created to remove some of the stigma associated with
prostitution
and to perhaps normalize the sex industry and those within it. The term is gaining in popularity and is a favorite of feminists and academics everywhere, yet it’s misleading, particularly when erroneously applied to children. It’s hard to have much patience with these proponents of the sex industry who, while simultaneously arguing that “sex work” can be empowering, would never dream of having sex for money themselves.

Those advocates for the sex industry who have had firsthand experience frequently fall into two camps. The first argue vehemently that they were not abused, came from middle-class and often privileged backgrounds, had often already attained a degree of educational success, and made an informed decision to do something that is “empowering” and brings them great freedom. This is the Diablo Cody route: A (normally) white, (normally) middle class, (normally) educated young woman chooses to enter the sex industry on a whim just for the experience or to write a book about it. She then leaves, proclaiming how “interesting” the experience was. Of course, these women, and sometimes men, fail to point out that they entered the sex industry with the knowledge that they could, and had the resources to, leave at any time, and therein lies the difference.