fancy dining, teenage girls’ culinary standards are relatively easy to meet. So are their standards for what qualifies as love, particularly for girls whose whole definition of love has been grossly distorted by the relationships they’ve seen growing up and the abuse that they’ve been told equals love. It doesn’t take a lot: a good nose for sniffing out vulnerability, a little kindness, a bit of finesse, paying attention to the clues she gives away about her family, her living situation, her needs. Once he’s got the hook in, a few meals, rides in his car, perhaps an outfit or getting her nails done can seal the deal. She thinks he cares. She wants to please him. It doesn’t really matter how he introduces the topic, whether he gets her drunk and takes her to a strip club, cries broke and asks her to do it “just this one time,” beats her into total submission, has his other girls encourage her that it won’t be that bad, or spins the promises of a better future, money, security, being “wifey,” the end result will be the same. He knows that once she crosses that line for the first time, it’ll be hard to go back. It might take a day and cost nothing, it might take a few weeks and cost a few dollars, but ultimately the investment he puts in will be worth the return. Even if he strikes out with a few girls who are perhaps not quite as vulnerable as he first assumed, it doesn’t really matter—there’s always another girl right around the corner. In fact, pimping is really an economist’s dream, a low-risk, low-investment, high-demand, high-income industry. Indeed, there are many pimps who are smart, shrewd, and calculating “businessmen,” but this concept does beg the question of how shrewd you really need to be to lure a fifteen-year-old who has run away from abuse at home and is currently spending the night on a train.
Some of the girls, however, have been forced into the sex industry through kidnapping and violence, held at gunpoint, pushed into a car, kept in a locked room. Girls are then raped, often gang-raped initially, to break their will. The subsequent shock and traumatic response leave the girl feeling utterly helpless and totally subdued. The fear often keeps her from running away. The shame can keep her from reaching out for help. While it can be shocking for people to initially learn that American girls, ones who never, ever make the news, are kidnapped with increasing frequency, these are still, relatively, the cases that tend to engender the most public sympathy and interest from the criminal justice system. Their victimization seems obvious and fits into a tidier, more common understanding of human trafficking.
Yet for most of the girls, the force, the violence, the gun in her face don’t come until later. Their pathway into the commercial sex industry is facilitated through seduction, promises, and the belief that the abuser is actually their boyfriend. Statistics show that the majority of commercially sexually exploited children are homeless, runaways, or the distastefully termed “throwaways.” These girls and young women have a tougher time in the court of public opinion and in the real courts of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. It is presumed that somewhere along the line they “chose” this life, and this damns them to be seen as willing participants in their own abuse.
WINTER 1993, GERMANY
It’s been three weeks and my money has dwindled down to about eight dollars. Eating for under a dollar a day may be possible in some countries but not in Germany. Nicotine, the good old appetite suppressant, has helped with the hunger pangs, but I barely can afford cigarettes now and I’m rationing them out to myself like a jailbird. Leaving England with girls I’d known for one evening on a one-way ticket, and believing that my ex-boyfriend would be so heartbroken that he’d send for me within a few weeks, doesn’t seem to have been that great a plan. The girls are
Some of the girls, however, have been forced into the sex industry through kidnapping and violence, held at gunpoint, pushed into a car, kept in a locked room. Girls are then raped, often gang-raped initially, to break their will. The subsequent shock and traumatic response leave the girl feeling utterly helpless and totally subdued. The fear often keeps her from running away. The shame can keep her from reaching out for help. While it can be shocking for people to initially learn that American girls, ones who never, ever make the news, are kidnapped with increasing frequency, these are still, relatively, the cases that tend to engender the most public sympathy and interest from the criminal justice system. Their victimization seems obvious and fits into a tidier, more common understanding of human trafficking.
Yet for most of the girls, the force, the violence, the gun in her face don’t come until later. Their pathway into the commercial sex industry is facilitated through seduction, promises, and the belief that the abuser is actually their boyfriend. Statistics show that the majority of commercially sexually exploited children are homeless, runaways, or the distastefully termed “throwaways.” These girls and young women have a tougher time in the court of public opinion and in the real courts of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. It is presumed that somewhere along the line they “chose” this life, and this damns them to be seen as willing participants in their own abuse.
WINTER 1993, GERMANY
It’s been three weeks and my money has dwindled down to about eight dollars. Eating for under a dollar a day may be possible in some countries but not in Germany. Nicotine, the good old appetite suppressant, has helped with the hunger pangs, but I barely can afford cigarettes now and I’m rationing them out to myself like a jailbird. Leaving England with girls I’d known for one evening on a one-way ticket, and believing that my ex-boyfriend would be so heartbroken that he’d send for me within a few weeks, doesn’t seem to have been that great a plan. The girls are
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