Pushout (16 page)

“A lot of girls are performing sex work and don't even know that they are performing sex work,” Paris pointed out. “[He might say], ‘Give me a little head or give me a little tail and I'll buy you something.' Hell, what you think you doing? Sex work. You are providing services for materialistic stuff.”

In my conversations with other young women who were involved in sex work, many did not identify as “sexually exploited” or “sex-trafficked” girls, nor did they believe themselves to be “prostitutes.”
Like Diamond, they might say instead that they have an older “boyfriend” (rather than a pimp) or “bust dates” to indicate a casual participation in the sex trade without fully committing to the idea that they were or are selling sex. These girls are vulnerable—very vulnerable—because they are often clawing their way out of some intense situations, without the supports of advocates or trained professionals who know how to respond to the needs of sexually exploited children. The men in their lives know that. These girls, who are often in foster care or come from unstable homes, become invisible in efforts to dismantle school-to-confinement pathways. With little understanding of how they're being pulled out, we call them dropouts. We—educators, neighbors, and other community members—fail to include their stories and experiences in our understanding of how and why girls may not be attending school, or how the jezebel stigma affects their ability to go to school.

“If you haven't eaten in a week because there's no food in your house,” Bobbie in New Orleans said to a group of us discussing life in trafficking, “and someone pulls up to you on the street and says, ‘If you do this for me, I will feed you' . . . you're going to do it.”

“And if someone feeds you and they do have sex with you,” I continued, “they may make you feel like the most special person in the world.”

“Or the most nastiest person,” Paris said. “Because at the end of the day, like again, as a person who was involved in sex work, those types of men have the mentality of like, ‘I can do whatever I want to you because I'm paying to do this to you.' So . . . you have some men who want the GF experience, and by that I mean that ‘girlfriend' experience. They not going to treat you like, you know, any type of way. They'll treat you like it's some type of relationship there. Then you have those men that want to talk to you crazy, want to talk to you reckless. . . . ‘Put this in your mouth, put that in your mouth, touch this, grab that . . . and then at the end of the
day, it makes you feel like, so degraded, like so low. . . . That was my problem with sex work. Although I was doing it for survival. . . . At the end of the day, I had a roof to provide. I had to put food in my stomach. Not only that, but I had a transition I had to keep up with, so it was a lot. . . . For those that are forced to deal with each and every man they come into contact with . . . these men auction them off. They will sit there and be like, the younger you are, the better, because you're young. You know, you haven't really been tampered with. So, a lot of men will pay a lot more for a younger girl.”

Child exploitation isn't free, and the girls who survive these experiences pay the highest price. Despite U.S. law that requires courts to order convicted traffickers to pay trafficking victims lost wages, they are much less likely than those who are labor-exploited to receive a monetary award for their suffering.
¹³
This payment, which rarely if ever comes, could never compensate for the deep damage and losses that have little do with finances.

Nola Brantley is co-founder and former executive director of Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth (MISSSEY), an organization that predominantly serves African American young women who have been sex-trafficked in the Bay Area. She says that the public's failure to embrace Black girls as trafficked may also be a function of how Black girls present to the public when they are still under the watchful eye of their predator, pimp, and/or gang. Brantley argues that sexually exploited Black girls are not choosing to participate in the sex trade; they are in the traumatic throes of a “domino effect” of choices made for them. “Did they choose to grow up in poverty?” she asks. “Did they choose sexual abuse? Did they choose to get raped, some of them before they could walk? Did they choose to grow up in a world where women and girls are not safe? . . . As women and girls become more sexualized in the world, the more they are seen as property.”
¹⁴

Black girls have been our forgotten daughters in responses to the global convergence of racial and gender inequality. Black girls are
fully human—they are more than “hos” or a “thing” to break and/or take.
¹⁵
For many girls, unwanted sexual attention in their early years sometimes leads to premature sexual behaviors. When a little girl who has been sexually assaulted is told and taught through children's rhymes passed through generations to “shake it to the East, shake it to the West, shake it to the one that she loves the best” and is routinely singing lyrics from songs that objectify Black girls' and women's bodies, her spirit is further fed with ideas that affect her understanding of relationships and her perception of herself. For many girls who have survived sexual victimization, these revelations may not come right away in part because of the ways their social world reinforces the idea that they
are
their sexuality—rather than the idea that they
own
and control their sexuality. Their personal acknowledgment of their true potential is further obscured when sexual victimization goes unchallenged, or worse, is embedded in schools.

Too Sexy for School

From fourth through sixth grade my friends and I, like many others our age, played a game during recess called Hide and Go Get It. It was a variation of hide-and-seek in which boys would chase the girls and then “go get it.”

“Go get what?” I remember asking a classmate one day during recess.

“You know what,” she said to me with a smirk.

I remember feeling helpless. In this game, in which girls had to literally hide to avoid sexual encounters with the boys, I felt a complete lack of control. There were some girls who were rumored to “like” being “caught” by the boys. Why would a girl “like” that attention at such a young age? What was this attention providing for her? For me, as a survivor of sexual abuse, the idea was terrifying. I ran fast to avoid being caught in those games. Some days I wondered why I was even playing, but I had learned that this was the game that the “popular” girls played. In this case, “popularity” came with being subjected to ridicule and speculation by
boys, other girls, and the many ways all children mimic the adult policing of girls' sexuality. Experiences like this, which are seen as nothing more than normal and harmless child's play, leave very young girls with the impossible task of trying to negotiate their own sexuality within ever-present gender and racial stereotypes. It's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the dynamics of more tangible victimization.

At nearly 19 percent, the rate of sexual victimization for Black girls and young women is among the highest for any group in the nation.
¹⁶
Girls experience sexual assault, objectification, or being seen as hypersexual in many places—including their homes, in the street, on buses and subway systems, in their places of worship, and in schools. It's a web that not only entangles Black girls' bodies but can also ensnare their minds. In the hallways, in the classrooms, on the yard, and in the bathrooms, Black girls describe conditions in which their bodies are scrutinized, touched (often without permission), and objectified in ways that make them feel self-conscious and constantly defensive.

In Chicago, a national hub for sex trafficking, young women were keenly aware of the ways in which assumptions about their sexuality and sexual behaviors were influencing their interactions with others: with other girls, but particularly with the men and boys in their schools and communities.
¹⁷
Discussing this sexualization of Black femininity with a group of Chicago girls, Leila explained how she sees the role of mentorship.

“That's why we have so many THOTy bodies,” she said. “Do you know what a THOTy body is? A THOT is someone who is promiscuous.
*
*
And to me, someone who is promiscuous is when you have multiple partners in a short amount of time . . . so I feel like the fathers being absent connects to the mother and it also
connects to the daughter. . . . These mamas [are] THOTy bodies, too, so I'm trying to figure out where it started. . . . My mama is very promiscuous and [she's] like forty-plus . . . yeah, it's hard for today's females.

“Like, I was trying to talk to this guy, and he was like, ‘You want to kick it?' I was like, ‘I don't kick it. I don't go in people's crib or whatever.' Why leave my crib to go to his? He was like, ‘So what you want to do?' I was like, ‘I like to go to the movies, and I like to go on dates.' He was like, ‘You a goofy.' That's what I feel like we have to deal with.”

In other words, this boy wanted Leila to come over to his place to have sex, but he thought it was ridiculous that she might actually be interested in going on a date.

“So if my self-esteem wasn't high enough,” Leila continued, shaking her head, “if anybody steady getting [told] ‘You a goofy' for respecting themselves or ‘You don't look as pretty 'cause your titties not out' . . . you got a group of females at school that's not even focused on school, but more focused on being accepted. . . . You could act proud of yourself, but every time you try to display that, you're getting knocked down. You doing something wrong. He told me that I was crazy! But luckily I know that I'm not crazy. . . . To me, that's a big struggle for females, and it has to do with sexuality.”

“TV plays a role, too,” Michelle chimed in. “And I seen something on Facebook yesterday.”

“I'm not going to lie,” Nala said. “I do engage that VH-1
Love and Hip-Hop
or whatever. . . .”

The group laughed. For many in the group, watching reality television was a guilty pleasure.

“But,” Nala said. “I don't have the same mindset. I've gotten to the point where I'm okay doing things for me. Like, I don't have to do extra for other people's attention. If I get it, I get it. If I don't, I wasn't supposed to, you know? But it has gone from like,
The Cosby Show
,
Family Matters
, [and shows] that actually had like . . .
families and everything to ‘Oh, this chick is just trying to have a baby by me and take my money.' We have that to look forward to on television.”

“I know a lot of people,” Leila chimed in, “girls [who] pop mollies.
*
*
And people don't know the effects of mollies yet. Now, think about what that's going to do to your education. You don't even know the effects of it . . . and a lot of them are getting into gangs as well because it's becoming so hard out here. There's no jobs. There's no structure. There's no role models. When you get that, you got young people ruling the world, and without structure, young people can't rule the world because life is what gives you that experience. They learning . . . and a female is going to be a THOT to get a guy's attention or be a gang banger to get a guy's attention. It's hard to just be a lady and get a guy's attention nowadays.”

Black girls, like other girls, want to be appreciated for who they are, not solely what they look like. In the summer of 2014, I observed girls in a media program write signs that read “I am not my booty” and other signs that declared their desire to be seen for more than their bodies. Throughout years of talking with girls, they have consistently, in both quiet and robust ways, inquired about why their bodies are objectified and their minds dismissed.

Across the country, nearly half of public schools (49 percent) have implemented a formal uniform policy or dress code designed to regulate the presentation of clothing in school or establish norms for student dress as a part of the school culture.
¹⁸
Uniforms provide a structure to the way students arrive in school and are associated with having a positive impact on classroom discipline, image in the community, student safety, and pride.
¹⁹
There is less peer scrutiny, critique of a young person's socioeconomic status, and emphasis on the “fashion show” because everyone is wearing the same
thing. However, there are two sides to this coin. As discussed in Chapter 2, enforcement of uniform or dress code rules can lead to different battles, ones that result in girls being asked to leave the school. Dress codes, for all of their benefits, have become a tool of oppression.

School structures often fail to recognize their role in facilitating the punishment—and policing—of Black girls' sexuality. Marcus, the same high school dean who noted that Black girls were “not docile,” felt that dress codes are an important part of establishing the school climate.

“We have a dress code,” he said. “Every school in our district has a dress code. And I believe that it has to be in place. So if a girl really doesn't want to be in school that day, they're going to test the limits with how revealing they're going to come to school. That's one way that they check out.”

From Marcus's vantage point, girls may intentionally come to school in clothes that violate the dress code and use it as an excuse not to stay for the day. Yet the girls who spoke with me never turned clothes into an excuse not to go to school. To the contrary, dress codes actively turned them away from school. They repeated several stories of showing up to school only to be turned away for something minor—like a belt missing, or the wrong color shoes—rather than a blatant affront to the dress code. For some of these students, the shoes they wore were the only shoes in their closets, and the absence of a belt was an oversight. And when it was deemed a more serious violation of the code, such as wearing tight-fitting garb or clothing that revealed cleavage, thighs, or other parts of their bodies, girls tended to perceive its implementation as subjective and arbitrary.