Girls Like Us (31 page)

Amanda, like many of the girls, wants a complete rehash of what she was like years ago, what I remember about first meeting her. I’ve got memories of them all, some much clearer than others, but they never get tired of hearing about themselves when they first came to GEMS. “Do me, do me,” they’ll chorus, as if I’m doing palm readings. I do my best to oblige, struggling sometimes as the sheer number of girls that we see each year increases and my brain feels a little less agile. Amanda, with her outsize personality, I remember very clearly.

“You were always smart, always had a huge personality,” I say, laughing. “You were my little entrepreneur. I remember when you wanted to raise money with a lemonade stand. . . . You must’ve been, what, twelve? Goodness, that makes me feel old.” The girls laugh, but it really does.

Jasmine’s incredulous. “Really? She had a lemonade stand?”

Amanda’s thinking,
I did?

“Yup, you were so insistent. Wouldn’t let me alone until I agreed.” As I talk the details come back to me.

“I gave you five dollars and you bought a jug and lemons and sugar and set up that little table we used to have, right in front of the office. You tried to set up on the corner but I told you the beauty salon might not appreciate you sitting outside their door.”

“I can’t believe you remember that,” Amanda says.

“Did she make any money?” Jasmine is fascinated by the whole story, a time before she came.

“Nah, of course not! We spent five bucks and I think she made a profit of about 60 cents. Sitting outside in the hot-ass sun all day, with a little sign you made . . .”

Jasmine and I are laughing hard, picturing Amanda acting like she’s in the suburbs sitting on our little block in Harlem trying to sell lemonade amid all the corner-heads, random passersby, and the hustlers doing their best to sell weed.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” Amanda says again quietly, and I stop laughing long enough to see her crying.

“Oh, sweetie, what’s wrong?” Amanda looks at me perplexed. I hadn’t meant to make her cry.

“I just can’t believe you remember stuff about me when I was growing up.” She’s sobbing now. I get up and give her a hug and realize the significance that my holding that memory for so many years has for her. For her, it means that she wasn’t forgotten, even during all those years when she’d been on the streets disconnected from everyone. It means that she matters. Her healing process is just beginning but at least she feels like she’s in a place where she belongs and is loved and is remembered. There’s a lot more work to do, but it’s a start.

Chapter 15
Leadership

But we do know that the women who recover most successfully
are those who discover some meaning in their experience that
transcends the limits of personal tragedy. Most commonly, women
find this meaning by joining with others in social action.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

SPRING 1998, CANADA

After having been in New York for only eight months, I find myself representing the United States as a delegate to the first international summit of sexually exploited youth. On the first day of the conference, I’m so nervous that I consider staying in my room for six days and watching cable, but I’m worried that this will get back to my boss, so I decide to tough it out. Since I’ve never been to a conference before, I have no idea what to expect. It’s been organized by Cherry Kingsley, a young survivor of commercial sexual exploitation, who has managed to get support from Senator Landon Pearson, an activist on behalf of children; the United Nations; and various other organizations that I’ve never heard of but who are apparently important enough to have raised enough resources to support the attendance of sixty young people from all over the Americas who are there to talk about sexual exploitation based on their own experiences.

While I’m slowly overcoming my fear of public speaking, at least in the context of the girls and women I work with at Rikers Island, I’m still painfully shy and have little confidence. At breakfast, I find a girl who looks just as terrified as me. Julia and I latch on to each other and sit together in the main conference room as Cherry takes to the podium to deliver her powerful and inspiring opening remarks. I’m in awe. She’s so poised and dynamic. Damn. I want to be her.

Cherry explains that the purpose of the summit is to ensure that survivor voices are no longer silenced, and that our expertise on our own experiences is heard by policy makers and others in power. This seems to me to be a noble goal, although I’m unsure if I have anything of value to add. We participants are asked to choose among several workshops in the visual arts, drama, dance, or something called “the agenda for action group.” As all the other groups seem to involve some form of creative expression, which to me translates as pretending to be a tree and making yourself look silly, I choose the last, the most tame and boring-sounding of them all. Julia feels the same way and comes with me.

There are ten of us in the “action” group: three girls from Central America, two guys from Canada, a First Nations girl, Julia, Cherry, and me. Also in our group are important-looking people from the United Nations and from all the other acronym organizations in attendance. There are more of the suits than there are of the youth, and quickly it appears that my wish of remaining silent for the week may come true. The “professionals” seem to be giving lip service to the idea of youth participation and are hogging the microphone, expounding at length on policy and official reports. This doesn’t feel relevant to the work I do daily, and certainly has very little to do with my past experiences. All of us survivors are sitting silently when suddenly Cherry, our fearless leader, interrupts one of the speakers. “This isn’t what I had in mind, this isn’t the point of the conference. You are silencing us again.” She’s not angry, just firm and unapologetic. The suits stop talking and look chastened. “You get to talk all the time, you’re always being heard. This is about survivor voices, not yours. Here . . .” She gets up and begins moving chairs. “You guys can sit in the outer circle and observe; we’ll sit in the inner circle and talk.” The room is shocked, but Cherry’s instincts are right. Once we survivors are in the smaller circle, the atmosphere changes and slowly we begin to get comfortable. Cherry suggests that we start by simply sharing our experiences. Cherry goes first and her openness and honesty about her struggles break the ice.

And so we tell our stories. One by one, slowly with no interruptions, no sanitized versions, no omissions. We tell how we grew up, how our parents failed us, how we first entered the life, how we felt turning tricks, and how much we hurt on the inside because we couldn’t really explain it to anyone. We cry for each person’s story, because it’s so much like our own and because it’s always easier to cry for someone else. My job back in New York is listening to the stories of women in the life but in that role, I’m a listener, always counseling, consoling, being conscious of my reactions, being careful not to make it be about myself. But at the summit I just let all that go and I cry. I don’t think I’ve ever cried this much in a public setting. All around us are the legislators and the policy makers and the United Nations people and yet I don’t see them. All I can feel is a circle of nine other people who’ve been in the life, just like me. I’ve never felt such acceptance as I do at that moment. Up until that time, I’ve learned to tell my story in a way that is both funny and compelling and a whole lot of other adjectives that manage to stand in between me and the reality. I’ve learned to distance myself from the “story” and tell it like it had happened to someone else. But now when it comes to my turn, I just tell it raw and true. Like I’m telling it for the first time, like I’m telling it to myself. It’s one of those moments that happens spontaneously, that can’t be created and can’t be facilitated. It reminds me of a night when I lived in Munich. I happened to be walking past a bar where a few drunken Irishmen were singing “Danny Boy” just as the rain started to fall. Even though they were drunk, their tenor voices were pure and strong. A crowd gathered to listen to the sheer beauty of the music, many of us with faces streaked with tears, even as the rain fell harder and harder. No one could walk away. That same feeling of transcendence is palpable within our little circle. We cry at the sheer sadness of the stories, and yet no one can walk away.

Four hours have gone by as we listened to each other and wept. The other workshops have broken for dinner, and we’re still here. And then finally it’s over and there’s a closeness between us that a hundred “Get to Know You” games couldn’t have accomplished. We hug like long-lost siblings reunited, not like the awkward strangers from a few hours earlier. Sharing memories that most people are never privy to, we’re a strange clan—male, female, gay, straight, Latin, British/Roma, First Nations, a virtual Benetton ad of kids who all remember what it felt like to be sold for sex. By the end of the week, I’ve facilitated a couple of the groups, done my first radio and print interviews, stayed up for three nights with Julia and Peter, one of the Canadian boys, drafting and redrafting the Declaration and Agenda for Action that will be the official document to come out of the conference. The first core belief we write down is:
We believe that the voices and experiences of sexually exploited children and youth must be heard and be central to the development and implementation of action. We must be empowered to help ourselves
. Throughout the week, I watch as that belief becomes a reality. On the last night, we present the Agenda for Action at a public forum with about four hundred legislators, policy makers, and nonprofit people. The reaction is amazing, and a few months later, I accompany Cherry as we present the document at the United Nations, where it is ratified by 130 countries. I don’t know enough then about the workings of the United Nations to know that it’s only symbolic and doesn’t really mean anything, so I’m thrilled that words I’ve written are being taken seriously on an international level.

I discover that week in Canada that I actually do have a lot of opinions on the issue and that people don’t think I’m stupid when I open my mouth. Like a novice karaoke singer, now that I’ve gotten comfortable with the microphone, it’s hard to pry it out of my hand. It’s an amazing feeling to be an expert on your own life, to have these shameful experiences actually be useful, to feel the shame lifting every time you speak out about what needs to be done to help other victims. My embarrassment at not yet having my GED and my struggles with intense shyness melt away in the presence of other powerful young survivors. I see glimpses of who I might become in Cherry and Julia and Peter, and for the first time I’m comfortable with the reflection.

After my experience in Canada, I knew that I wanted to figure out how to support survivor leadership, both for myself and for the girls I was meeting. I was lucky that when I came into the field in 1997, in addition to Cherry, I had role models like the late Norma Hotaling, who founded Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE); and Vednita Carter from Breaking Free. These women and their programs were examples for me of what I could achieve, and of the fact that I didn’t have to be limited by my past. I wanted to give the same hope to other girls.

Yet founding an organization at the age of twenty-three, after a year in the United States, was challenging. Founding an organization as a survivor was even tougher. I fought hard to overcome people’s perceptions of me, the assumptions they would make, the stereotypes that they would often verbalize. For a while, I took to wearing nonprescription glasses to convey the impression that I was smart and bookish. The glasses didn’t help much once people found out about my past. Then the reactions would range from morbid curiosity to unwarranted and inappropriate sympathy to barely disguised contempt.

I realized that one of the most important roles that I could play was to give a face to the issue, to humanize survivors and challenge people’s preconceived notions about them. People would tell me “I had no idea,” as if I should’ve come equipped with a warning sign, or at least a scarlet letter. People’s perceptions of sexually exploited girls are often based on media depictions of girls in the sex industry, a Lifetime movie version, a
Law & Order
portrayal of a tough girl in stilettos on a street corner, chewing gum and cursing everyone out. The assumption is that these girls must be slow or at least not very intelligent. As I began to speak out at conferences and meetings, countless numbers of people feel the need to tell me how articulate I am. Initially I take it as a compliment, although I soon realize that it’s always said with a tone of surprise and a good helping of condescension. One male executive director serving exploited girls compliments me after a meeting for “learning how to dress quite professionally,” as if I’d been tempted to turn up in a miniskirt and stilettos. If I’m passionate about an issue, people suggest that my trauma history has made me angry, as opposed to the fact that I might actually be angry because girls are treated outrageously by the justice system. If I’m not angry enough, it’s because I’m dissociating. If I don’t like someone, especially a man, it’s because I have trust issues, not because the person might actually be a total jerk. People ask wildly inappropriate questions during presentations, make crude jokes, and often ask to “see my scars” as if I’m a show-and-tell project.

It’s frustrating to continually feel like you’re being weighed up against some invisible stereotype, but I work hard to challenge as many of the perceptions as I can. Over the next few years, I overachieve like crazy, graduating summa and then magna cum laude with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, all to prove that I’m more than a story, more than just my past. Often I’m proving it to myself just as much as to others, as it’s their low expectations and beliefs about me that I am secretly scared are really true.

Once I start GEMS, I teach the girls to fight, too. They’ve got to overcome prejudices that are based on race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and their histories of sexual exploitation. Plus they’ve got to overcome their own beliefs about themselves, their abilities, their guilt, their shame. Few people they know think that they’re capable of being anything, let alone leaders. The girls largely agree. Yet for girls and young women whose voices have been silenced and who have had little to no control over the smallest of decisions, the opportunity to speak out, to create change, and to have leadership roles can be life-altering.