Girls Like Us

Girls Like Us

YA/adult nonfiction
"She likes swimming, SpongeBob, Mexican food, writing poetry,
getting her nails painted (light pink is her favorite color), and
Harry Potter books (plus she thinks Daniel Radcliffe is 'fine'). This
Christmas, she really wants an iPod but would settle for some
sweatsuits, preferably pink. Sometimes she's petulant--pouting and
sullen--but mostly she's open and eager to be loved. When she smiles,
huge dimples crease her chubby face and are still capable, as she
moves into awkward adolescence, of melting hearts. She's much like
any other eleven-year-old girl in America, except for one critical
difference. Over the last year of her life, she's been trafficked up
and down the East Coast by a twenty-nine-year-old pimp and sold
nightly on Craigslist to adult men who ignore her dimples and purchase
her for sex."
Reading the first paragraph of Rachel Lloyd's Girls Like Us is
like diving into ice cold water. The reader is drawn into a world (s)
he never knew existed. It's a world Lloyd knows from personal
experience. Like many other trafficked girls, she started life in a
dysfunctional family. By 14 she was working full time, no longer in
school. One night she came home to find an unconscious mother and a
suicide note. A job dancing in a strip club segued into working for
pimps and being brutally beaten.
This was not the end of the line for Lloyd, however. With the
help of a caring church, she was able to turn her life around. Moving
to America, she devoted herself to helping and advocating for girls
like her former self.
Lloyd lays some hard truths on us. In many countries including
America girls are being sexually trafficked. In a cruel victim
blaming they are said to have chosen the life style even if they are
nowhere near the age of consent. It's easy to make a convenient
narrative that erases elements like severe childhood abuse, poverty,
and too few alternatives for survival.
If you think they deserve better than you absolutely must read
the book.
These girls aren't always someone else. If not for a lucky
break I could have been a pimp's property. They are very cadgy
opportunists. I became homeless in Boston with nobody to turn to for
help because the company with the job I was downsized from hadn't paid
into unemployment. There was a shelter with a three day limit. My
last day there I had the luck of a newspaper ad leading me to a live
in babysitting gig. But I've been looked up and down like an animal
being assessed by a butcher. It's nothing you'd want for yourself or
your daughter.
On a personal note, I was at UMaine with some of my chums yesterday
when the news broke about President Pennywise's lawyer's office being
raided by the FBI. We all gathered around a big screen TV, feeling we
were witnessing history being made. We noticed something
interesting. CNN was giving us play by play and analysis. Fox was
doing a head in the sand number, talking about anything else.
A great big shout out goes out to investigators who carry out the
people's business even when pressured not to by people in high places
and media people who keep us up to date instead of trying to steer us
in other directions.
jules hathaway


Sent from my iPod