Girls Like Us

Helping girls develop a healthier relationship with money, seeing it as something neutral and showing them that people can make money doing something they actually enjoy, is an important step in helping them unlearn old patterns.

Their attitudes and core beliefs have to be reframed. Their boundaries are so blurred and distorted that even once girls get the basic concept that violence is not OK under any circumstances, it can still be a struggle for them to develop healthy boundaries in intimate relationships and in friendships. Commercially sexually exploited girls are used to giving and giving and giving—taking care of their pimps, taking care of their johns’ “needs”—an ingrained pattern that often goes back to childhood when they took care of family members, whether it was younger siblings or parents. Most girls struggle with codependency in and out of the life, and it can take a while to stop being the caretaker. Even their relationship with money is distorted. Money, love, and sex have all become entangled, and girls often have a tough time setting limits on giving money to needy family members, and especially needy boyfriends, even when they’re barely making ends meet themselves.

So many of these girls, their family members, the social workers, and law enforcement officials believe their exploitation was their choice. This perspective keeps them stuck.

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.

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.

There are no studies that suggest that it takes a “weak” personality to succumb to Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonding, but clearly children are more vulnerable and more easily convinced that their abuser has the power to carry out all and any threats. It is not surprising that they would bond more quickly than adults to their abusers.

their best chance for survival was to comply and bond with the person who had the power to keep them alive.

As William Jelani Cobb, a professor at Spelman College, points out, “As long as black women could be understood to be sexually lascivious, it was impossible to view them as victims of sexual exploitation.”

It is clear that race and class make a difference in how much of a victim we believe you are.

If they are not good victims, in other words, they are not real victims.