time that I’m hearing her specific story, it’s all too easy to imagine because, save for a few details, it sounds pretty much like every other recruitment story I’ve ever heard.
Elizabeth tells me that she just knew her man loved her when he took her to a fancy restaurant. Where, honey? Red Lobster. After that, she thinks she owes him, so she does whatever he tells her to do.
Tanya’s mother, an alcoholic, won’t buy her the new Barbie. She hops a train into Manhattan to buy it herself at FAO Schwarz with her savings. Lost in Times Square, Tanya meets a man who says he’ll help her. He takes her to the track that night. She’s eleven years old.
Bethany’s mother sells her for drugs on the street. When she starts junior high school she discovers that she’s been sold to some of her own family members. Humiliated, she runs away and meets a guy who picks up where her mother left off.
Ashanti thinks that the cute guy she meets in a homeless shelter is her boyfriend. They decide to hunt for an apartment together, but are approached at gunpoint by three men who force them into a car. She thinks they’re being robbed but then she realizes that he knows these guys and is part of the plan.
Shana’s a quiet, studious, sheltered twelve-year-old when she meets a twenty-two-year-old who wants to be her boyfriend. She loses her virginity to him. He puts her out on the track. She says she’s in love.
Alina watches her mother walk around the neighborhood offering her body in exchange for crack and then later watches her slowly dying from AIDS as the neighborhood shuns her. When she meets a pimp, it doesn’t seem that bad by comparison.
Jessica is sixteen when she moves from North Carolina to live with an aunt who’s just met a new man and doesn’t want Jess there anymore. After she’s kicked out, Jessica sleeps on the train for a few nights and eventually starts sleeping with men who feed her and let her stay over. It seems like a good idea to get a pimp for protection.
Maria is homeless due to her mother’s schizophrenia and continual instability. She meets a guy who takes her in and sets her up in his mother’s basement. He starts bringing guys in and forces her to strip for them. He’s frustrated that she’s too young at twelve to know how to dance “sexy” enough, so he teaches her.
It reminds me of a macabre version of the Choose Your Own Adventure books: A few options along the way will ultimately lead to one of not many outcomes. If you chose running away from your mom, skip to page 6, where you’ll meet a pimp at the subway. If you chose running away from a group home, skip to page 7, where you’ll meet a girl who’ll introduce you to a pimp. If you’re homeless and feel like you to have to trade sex in exchange for a place to sleep that night, jump ahead to page 15, where you’ll be living with a guy who now sells you every night. There’s no grand prize at the end of these stories, though, no reward. Just a few minor variations on the same theme—vulnerable meets predatory; abused child meets billion-dollar sex industry. Not hard to guess the ending.
Recruiting a vulnerable girl isn’t hard either. As Lloyd Banks so aptly states in the remix of 50 Cent’s platinum-selling song “P.I.M.P.,” “I ain’t gotta give ’em much, they happy with Mickey D’s.” Teenage girls, especially those who’ve already been abused, who are living in poverty, who come from fractured families, are relatively easy to lure and manipulate. In fact, despite 50 Cent’s argument that the song is referring only to adult women being sold (presumably less disturbing), it’s hard to picture an adult woman, unless she is literally homeless or starving, being “happy with Mickey D’s.”
Yet having worked with preteen and teenage girls for thirteen years, I know that nothing causes greater excitement than announcing a trip, especially in my car, to McDonald’s. Like Elizabeth, who was wooed by her concept of
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