Girls Like Us (21 page)

Yet many of these girls experience the same types of psychological conditions necessary for Stockholm syndrome to develop. Pimps make sure to isolate trafficked and exploited girls from perspectives other than their own. They often refer to families and friends as “the square world,” and work hard to convince a girl that these people don’t really care about her, don’t love her the way he does, have never really been there for her. Traveling and being taken to cities where she knows no one and is on unfamiliar territory are also common. Everyone she meets is in some way connected to the life; her entire world becomes pimps, johns, and other victimized girls. Her wives-in-law are traumatized and bonded already, unable to offer a different perspective. Johns, by virtue of buying her, also reinforce the belief that this is who she is, what she deserves, that it’s not worth running away because she has nothing to run home to. Even in rare interactions with social workers, emergency room personnel, passersby, rarely is she exposed to a different perspective or at least to one that could help her. Her pimp’s already warned her that the “squares” are not to be trusted and will just judge her and make her feel worthless. After a while, the life, the game, becomes her only true reality.
Squares are stupid. Dumb girls give it away for free. It’s normal to share your man with four other girls. Giving him your money is for the best, as you wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.

Over the years I’ve heard girls at GEMS say that their pimps have called me “the poison pimp” because I try to poison the girls’ minds against the truth. One girl who was court-mandated to GEMS as an alternative to incarceration tells me that her pimp has warned her that we will try to “brainwash” her and that she shouldn’t believe anything we say. I ask her why she thinks he said that, and after a few minutes of deep thought, she says, “perhaps cos
he’s
brainwashing me.” For a moment, I think she’s had a revelation, but if so, it’s short-lived, as minutes later she’s telling me how good he is to her, how much she deserves the beatings.

Of course, it takes more than simply isolation from other perspectives to develop the intense relationship with their abusers that clinicians call trauma bonds. Even if the grooming period is full of promises and “love,” there comes a point where the pimp will begin to exert force and control in order to develop the strongest levels of loyalty and submission. In a book on rape, Drs. Lorenne Clark and Debra J. Lewis assert that “all unequal power relationships must, in the end, rely on the threat or reality of violence in order to maintain themselves.” For commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls, the perception of threats is almost always based on the reality of violence. Girls believe that their pimps will act on their threats to hurt, to maim, to kill, and with good reason. So many of these girls have experienced rape, had guns held to their head, heard their trafficker talk about other girls he’s killed—enough violence, in other words, to ensure that girls are hesitant about running away. One girl I worked with, Marlene, went on a date to a bowling alley with a guy she’d met at the train station. Upon leaving the bowling alley, she was thrown into a van by her date and his accomplice and had her identification taken away. Her kidnappers knew that the address on her ID was her grandmother’s and so they threatened to go to her family’s house to kill them if she tried to escape. Marlene was taken to the basement of a house and shown a wooden pole with torn duct tape around it and then shown a vast array of weapons: swords, hunting knives, machetes, and nunchucks. She was told that this was where girls who were disobedient were brought. When Marlene was told that she had to work the streets, she complied. For several weeks, she worked hard to be obedient and trustworthy, although her pimp rarely let her out of his sight. When she overheard that she was to be sold to another pimp and taken out of state, she decided to try to escape. Because she’d been so submissive, doing everything she was told, her pimp finally left her alone for a few hours and she ran to the nearest phone and called her mother.

Her mother called us and we called the police, who went to pick her up. I drove out to meet her at the precinct. When I arrived, Marlene was being interrogated, accused of lying and being questioned as to why she hadn’t tried to escape sooner. To me, Marlene had done everything she needed to do to stay alive, and had been smart and strategic about her survival. To the police officers, because she hadn’t been chained up for her captivity and because she acknowledged complying with her abuser’s orders to be sold for sex, there was no way she’d been kidnapped, no way she was really a victim. Marlene was able to provide an address and a name; her pimp had a record for assault and kidnapping, and yet the police refused to pick him up, citing lack of evidence. I spent a long and frustrating night arguing with two male officers who simply would not understand that Marlene’s perception of threats to her survival was real and justified and that her actions were totally understandable. I was glad that these weren’t the police officers who had found Elizabeth Smart.

In Marlene’s case, her compliance with her captor kept her alive and reduced the occurrence of violence and harm. While she hadn’t yet reached a stage of bonding with her abuser, the critical factors for Stockholm syndrome were certainly in place.

Angelina’s been coming into the office for a few weeks now, referred by her social worker due to a yearlong stay in a juvenile detention center on a prostitution charge. Long and gangly, all limbs, with mild acne, at sixteen she’s every bit an awkward adolescent. I’m the first person she meets on her arrival and we bond a little, although she’s reserved and hesitant to talk much about her experiences. She does, however, read a newspaper story that hangs in the front of the office about my experiences in the life, and seems to appreciate this fact about me. While she’s assigned to a caseworker, Angelina seems to gravitate toward me every time she comes in and slowly starts opening up, more and more, with each visit. I learn that she ran away at twelve although she’s quick, too quick, to defend her family, and simply puts her running away down to “wanting to be grown.” Something about the way she talks, particularly about her family, doesn’t sit right with me, though. There’s so much bubbling silently under the surface. Smart and thoughtful, Angelina strikes me as the kid who was trained a long time ago to keep secrets. Angelina, both book and street-smart, has been working on her GED since she came home. She has lots of questions for me—“Did you love your daddy?” “Where did you go to school?” “How did you leave him?” “What do you have to do at work every day?”—and seems to ponder the answers carefully, as if trying to decide what might work for her, where she might end up.

She sits quietly nearby, asking to help with whatever project I’m working on. One day, as she sits helping me file, she suddenly blurts out, “I miss him.” I have no doubt who the “him” she’s referring to is: her pimp, Suave, a thirty-five-year-old man who recruited her when she was twelve, less than a few hours after she first hit the street. Suave’s currently in jail, although unfortunately not for what he did to Angelina.

“That’s normal; it’s normal to miss someone who was a big part of your life . . . even if it wasn’t good. What do you miss?”

“Him tellin me to get my ass in the house. I miss him tellin me what to do. You know . . . what time to get up, what to wear, to go to work . . . stuff like that.” She smiles just thinking about this. “I’d go back to him if I could,” she says cheerfully. “He was like my father.” The quiet surface begins to break. “I really love him.”

Something about the way she says this, with true longing, breaks my heart. “What about the other things, though? The times he hurt you and the things you had to do.”

“Oh, I know. He didn’t mean all that stuff, though; sometimes I just made him mad.” This leads to a discussion of “making people mad” as opposed to people taking responsibility for their own actions. I feel like I make some good points. She remains unconvinced. “I still want to go back, though.”

I sigh, hopefully inwardly, although I can’t be sure. She’s still so stuck, physically free but emotionally tied; I know I can’t push too hard. If I do, I become the bad guy as she defends her love, her man, her experiences and feelings for the last three years. I try a different tack. “Why don’t we make a list . . . of the good things and the bad stuff? The things you miss and the stuff you don’t. Maybe it’ll help sort through some of these feelings.” She looks skeptical. “I made one when I left my pimp and it kinda helped me think stuff through,” I say. My own list-making process had, in fact, offered a startling realization that my version of love was perhaps a little distorted, to say the least. When I saw that on the plus side, I’d written
Put cocoa butter on my welts from the belt,
I knew something was wrong. Making the list hadn’t changed my feelings for a long time, but it did change the way I thought about them.

I tear a sheet of paper from my notebook, and draw a line down the middle. I write
Things He Did That Made Me Feel Happy/Loved
at the top of one column and
Things That Made Me Feel Sad/Cry
at the top of the other.

She goes to sit on the couch and I see her start scribbling. The writing stops after a couple of minutes and she sits quietly for a while, sucking on the end of the pen, thinking hard. I’m guessing she’s working on the
Things He Did That Made Me Feel Sad/Cry
side. I go back to my work and let her sit with her memories for a little while longer. After about forty minutes, she comes into my office. “I’m finished. Here.” Thrusting the paper at me as if it’s radioactive. I’m not surprised to see how short the
Things He Did That Made Me Feel Happy/Loved
column is, although I’m mildly surprised and secretly pleased that her list of negatives is so long; she’s really put a lot of thought and energy into this. It is, as always, a jarringly unequal list of pros and cons:
He told me he was my daddy
, plus;
He hit me
, minus;
He takes me on trips
, plus;
He makes me have sex with other men
, minus;
He gave me an STD
, minus;
He beat me with an extension cord
, minus;
He said I was a dumb bitch
, minus,
He told me he loved me
, plus, plus, plus.

As we sit together going over the list, there’s an item on the pro side that I don’t understand. Her tiny printed handwriting reads
Cheetos
. “Huh, what’s this, Angie?”

“You told me to think of the times when he loved me, so there was this one time, when he got mad at something I did, I can’t remember what, and he hit me some. And I was crying and shit and so then he left and that made me cry more cos he left me when I was crying. But then he came back and he’d gone to the store and he bought me Cheetos and a chocolate Yoo-Hoo milk.”

I look at her a little blankly.

“Cos they were my favorites. And he knew they were my favorites and he got them for me to make me feel better.” She smiles at this memory and I can picture her drying her tears—“Thank you, Daddy”—oh, so grateful for $1.25 worth of junk food from the corner bodega. “That’s the main time I knew that he really loved me.” She must mistake the look of sadness probably creeping across my face as incomprehension, as she explains again, “Cos they were my favorite and that was mad thoughtful of him.”

As we continue to go through the list—
Set me up to get raped
,
Left me in jail
—I’m thinking, how easy it is, how little it takes. A bag of Cheetos and chocolate Yoo-Hoo outweighed all the painful, awful, evil stuff he’d done. In the right circumstances, it didn’t take much at all.

When someone has the power to take your life but doesn’t, you feel grateful. It may not make logical sense but it does make psychological sense. Given that most people haven’t experienced someone wielding the threat of death over their heads, it can be hard to understand just how intense that type of bond can feel. Yet even in cases where the threat is external and the people present are not the instigators, for example in a plane crash, a serious car accident, a natural disaster, a bond often develops between the survivors that is stronger than many other relationships. It’s part of what makes combat vets, firefighters, or even police officers feel a bond to their fellow soldiers or partners that is indescribable to anyone outside of their worlds. Given the shared trauma that multiple girls under the control of one pimp may feel, there is the potential for the same type of bonds to develop between them; yet unlike the military or the police and fire departments, where loyalty to your comrades is strongly encouraged and supported, pimps work to create tension, jealousy, and betrayal between girls who are all suffering from the same threats. Bonding with the abuser, then, makes sense because after all, he’s the one with the power to take your life, not the other girls.

The desire to perceive kindness when there is none, or to magnify small, inconsequential acts of basic human decency to proportions worthy of gratitude and love, can also be seen in other victims. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in a controversial account of his concentration camp experiences during the Holocaust, notes that his fellow prisoners came to believe that the guards were showing kindness toward them even in the most mundane of acts such as wiping their feet before entering the barracks so that the prisoners would have less to clean up. In the
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
, the former slave clearly developed a level of Stockholm syndrome toward his “master” Pascal and sought to find “kindness” even in the midst of his traumatic experiences as a slave. “I had sails to lie on, and plenty of good victuals to eat, and everybody on board used me very kindly, quite contrary to what I had seen from white people before.”

Again, the critical factor is not whether the kindness is legitimate or valid, simply that the victim perceives it to be so. For Danielle, it’s her cubic zirconia necklace; for Angelina, it’s the chocolate Yoo-Hoos; for another girl it’s the gift of a
Wizard of Oz
DVD, for another it’s being allowed to sit in the
front
seat of the car. For some girls, the only kindness is the absence of violence, or at least the reduced levels of violence in comparison to what they knew he was capable of. I’ve heard girls say, “Well, he didn’t beat me like he beat the other girls.” Or, “He hit me with an open hand not a closed fist.” The gratitude and the relief are palpable.