Pushout (15 page)

“Because she has special ed, because she has an IEP, I'm going to bring in somebody to work with her one-on-one, and so I did do that. We will work with her one-on-one in a special class, and [the specialist] worked with her a couple of periods and tried to transition her. So what we have seen is a big improvement, actually work is getting done, and then the acting out in the other classroom is not there anymore. So we are not where she can be in a classroom with a teacher yet, and you know logistically I can't replace the teacher, but what I can do is provide some outside support for her.”

Still, this principal lamented, external supports and specialists require funding. “If a child isn't in school enough, then that child may get misdiagnosed,” he continued. “That process takes time, but if the child is not there, it won't happen, so year after year it's compounded. . . . And then in the school sense too—when funding gets cut, then the kids ultimately suffer. Kids are resilient, and those that are on the college track are going to stay on the college track. It's the average kids that are going to suffer because of [a lack of] funding.”

Public education remains one of the nation's most ripe environments for inequality. From Julio's perspective as a principal, chronic absenteeism made it difficult for the school to reach out to students who might have special learning needs. The structure of the learning environment made it difficult to develop innovative approaches for girls in trouble with the law, many of whom are also being trafficked. Indeed, though many of the girls in his school had a history of sex trafficking, he felt that there was little he could do to intervene. He did, however, feel that the school could be an important partner.

According to Jennifer, a special education student who was never able to fully develop her relationship with school, educators and other key stakeholders have to take a more proactive role in explaining to girls why education is so important to their development.

“Make them care more about their education,” she said. “'Cause a lot of these girls don't think education is important, or why, like, ‘What is education going to do for me?' It's going to do a lot for you. You have to go through a process to get what you want. Just like you have to hustle for a lot of money to get what you want, like the new Jordans or whatever, you got to go through that process of getting your money. Just like education.”

In a separate conversation, Diamond agreed. When I asked her what might keep her in school, she replied, “Like, probably, more attention. More attention and providing of what I ask. Like, if I ask that I need something, it's not that I'm trying to annoy you. I'm trying to ask you for things that I really actually need.”

“When you think about the other needs you have in your life,” I said, “how can the school help you so that you don't have to do anything illegal to get it? What do you need to stay focused in school and doing what you've got to do?”

“I don't know about the other girls that's in the sex industry, but for me, like, I like to talk about it and get it out of my
system. . . . I don't know, cry about it and stuff. I think that would help me better because, I don't know, I like to share.”

Narrative is a powerful tool for learning and for rehabilitation. In Diamond's response and in Jennifer's call for a space that would allow her to talk through the importance of education were requests to rebuild a relationship—not just with individuals but with school as an institution.

I asked Diamond if there were things that could happen in the school environment or with teachers that might help her transition back into school smoothly. We talked about the potential for school-to-career programs that might help her understand the connections between her education and work. Like Jennifer, she felt making this connection was necessary, and particularly appealing to girls who have been trafficked.

“I think that would help. . . . I can't speak for nobody else. But like, I think that would help because, for some reason, for some kids, coming [to juvenile hall] won't help them . . . I probably need counseling. Like, I'm trying to get stronger, but my boyfriend . . . he's like, I don't know . . . it takes a while . . . I think I'm processing faster since I been here. I should have never done that. I'm not making that mistake again. That person wasn't right for me. I'm not taking that chance again. It's going to hurt
me
in the long run. It's not hurting him. He's free right now . . . while I'm sitting here locked up twenty-four hours.”

Then, Diamond started to cry as she came to terms with having been abandoned by a man she depended on to care for her—a man who sold her body and who did not come to visit her while she was in detention. A man who she suspected had moved on. I consoled her but also let her sit with the realization that this man might not be what she expected.

“What kind of people do you need in your life, at school, to be successful?” I asked. “Like, what would your ideal counselor look like?”

“I just need somebody that is not there just to
listen
, but who actually
feels
me . . . who knows where I'm coming from and really understands. . . . Like, ‘Oh, you been a prostitute, I feel you' . . . somebody like that. . . . Somebody that's going to be there when I need them, like . . . three times a week, four times a week. Like when I feel bad and stuff.”

Regularly available counselors and therapists in school are critical to providing the type of emotional support that formerly trafficked girls need to heal from the pain and trauma that they have experienced. Otherwise, schools risk becoming a location where girls continue to experience harm. Diamond and I talked some more about how to avoid that.

“So, aside from a counselor who would be there, how do you think schools in general could better respond to Black girls in crisis?” I asked.

“Usually the teachers, like, will only connect with certain students that think they deserve more because they get straight A's. There's a reason why they're getting straight A's—because they're faster learners. Y'all [are] teaching them more, and they study more and they're getting more attention than the other kids. Like Black kids at home, we don't get that much attention. Our mother and dad are working. Our sister is taking care of us. Our auntie, grandma . . . is taking care of us. We don't have that attention that we want from our parents, that makes us disrespectful in class and make us be like, [to the teacher] ‘Bitch, I don't care . . . I see my mama . . . I don't see you. You're not my mama.'”

Though nationwide the numbers tell us that Black parents are involved in their children's education—checking homework, talking about the importance of education with their children
⁸
—that was not Diamond's experience. For many of the girls on the margins, their parents are also suffering from debilitating conditions of poverty, addiction, and their own tumultuous relationships with people and with schools. Diamond was calling for a different
reality, at least when she walks into school. In other words, for girls who have a history of sexual exploitation and abuse, school cannot ignore them or what they experience outside school walls. Even though institutions are prone to reinforcing or replicating the norms of society, Diamond's path reveals why schools should actively work to generate a different culture, one that doesn't prioritize high performers over everyone else. Our public schools—especially for these girls—need to be a place of stability and consistency, a place where new norms can emerge. For too many kids, school is the only place they can learn how
not
to play the circumscribed role the rest of the world casts them in.

“So, basically, what I hear you saying is that you want somebody who
cares
about you,” I said.

“Yeah! Exactly. Like, somebody that I can trust. Not somebody that I can be like, we're cool one day and not cool the next day. How can I talk to this person? How can I ask them questions? Why would I raise my hand . . . [when the response is] ‘Why are you talking to me? Oh, do your work'? Okay, I just wanted to ask you a question. Okay, I won't bother you. Okay, I'm not going to do the work. F——it. You know? [Then we] get careless because we don't feel like it's worth it if we don't connect with that person.”

Going Back in Time

The steering of girls into sex work is a global culture, not just a decision point in the criminal legal system in the United States. Girls of all backgrounds are up against the sexist and dismissive notions that they are choosing a life of prostitution rather than being trafficked into it, though this characterization is significantly more common when it comes to Black girls. As Paris explained, Black girls are often trafficked by more than just a single individual. Latent in our willingness to cast them as “choosers” of this underground economy are racialized gender stereotypes about the hypersexualization of Black girls—a myth that was historically
used to justify the rape of enslaved Black females, and which has since morphed into a stereotype about “fast” Black girls that renders them vulnerable to multiple forms of abuse.

The myth of the “bad” Black woman is rooted in the historical assumption that Black women possess an elevated level of sexuality beyond other women, that they are eager for sexual exploits, or that they are “loose in their morals.” Therefore they are perceived, as they have been historically, as deserving “none of the considerations and respect granted to White women.”
⁹
The sexual terrorism to which Black women were subjected as enslaved women was justified by casting them as immoral and sexually insatiable.

This sentiment was memorialized by an anonymous article written in 1902 for
The Independent
, in which the author, a self-described “colored woman, wife and mother,” wrote, “There is a feeling of unrest, insecurity, almost panic among the best class of negroes in the South. . . . A colored woman, however respectable, is lower than the white prostitute. . . . We are neither ‘ladies' nor ‘gents,' but ‘colored.'”
¹⁰
Two years later, Fannie Barrier Williams, a northern Black educator and activist, advocated for a fully integrated women's rights movement. This, she argued, would include the need to address the myth of innate Black female promiscuity—which in turn affected social and policy responses to the victimization of Black women. In an article published by
The Independent
in 1904, Williams wrote the following:

I think it but just to say that we must look to American slavery as the source of every imperfection that mars the character of the colored American. It ought not to be necessary to remind a Southern woman that less than 50 years ago the ill-starred mothers of this ransomed race were not allowed to be modest . . . and there was no living man to whom they could cry for protection against the men who not only owned them, body and soul, but also the souls of their husbands, their brothers, and alas, their
sons. Slavery made her the only woman in America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.
¹¹

Such long-held, deeply ingrained stereotypes have had a lasting imprint on society's understanding of Black feminine sexuality. Iterations of the “jezebel” remain a part of our contemporary narrative about Black femininity.
¹²
We see her not only in the presentation of hypersexualized “vixens” in hip-hop videos but also in social discourses that produce public policy responses to child welfare, health, and criminalization or incarceration.

The educational domain today is infused with the prevailing stigma of “jezebel”—primarily in the form of concerns among school officials about the moral decency of girls. The regulation of this so-called decency often happens through dress codes and other comments and behaviors that sexualize Black girls in schools. But it is most apparent in school responses to girls who have been sexually exploited. Teen girls who wear tight or revealing clothing, who are parenting, who are “slut-shamed” and bullied, who express gender along a continuum, and/or who are sexually assaulted are all living under the cloak of jezebel.

The Real

“I was involved in sex work for a very long time,” Paris, who is now a community organizer in her early twenties, admitted. “And was forced into sex work, not by a [pimp] . . . We talk about trafficking, but we don't talk about it in terms of how
society
traffics individuals. Because society could traffic you, especially transwomen. And what I mean by society, I'm talking about not having any job opportunities, not having any housing opportunities, not having so many different opportunities that y'all may have that we don't. So I had to get it how I did . . . but one thing I did do was go to school. I didn't care how long I was on that corner for, or how long I was up the next night, I made it to school. I graduated. That's one thing I did not play with, was my schooling. To each his own, though . . .
again, I didn't have a [pimp], I didn't have anybody making me stay home, and a lot of these girls that are trafficked deal with not only the abuse, but they deal with being raped.

“Those men have to train those girls to be scared of them, to make them not want to leave,” Paris continued. “We be like, ‘Girl, child, we'll leave, we'll go on the block one night and we'll disappear.' But a lot of them men store fear into those women, to where they feel like wherever [they] go, [they'll] always have somebody watching . . . so they keep tabs on you and stuff like that. Some of those girls . . . before they are actually put out on the streets, they're held hostage in houses for months at a time getting raped, getting drugs injected into their veins, and coke forced up their nose, just to get them hooked on these addictions just to drag them through the mud. Basically, beat them down, then put them on the stroll because now you're dealing with addiction, you're dealing with so much other stuff. ‘If you want your drugs, I'm going to supply them to you, but you have to bring me the money first.' So, those girls . . . I know for sure have to meet a quota. Those girls have to go out. . . . If he got twelve girls out there working for him, he expects at the end of the night to have all twelve of those girls to bring in $100. You know that's $1,200 he just made at the end of the day. . . . If you don't meet that quota, he will either have one of the other girls assault you, or he will assault you himself. So, I mean, it's a whole lot. This is real. School-to-prison pipeline or school pushouts . . . all these things are real and sex work has a big part to play in it.