Invisible Girls

by Patti Feuereisen

  In 1999 Sweden passed laws to protect prostitutes and punish johns, and in only two years they saw a decline of 50 percent in the number of women prostitutes and 75 percent in the number of men buying sex.11 Norway and Iceland adopted similar legislation in 2009, and leading British politicians have called for the same. In 2015 the European Parliament announced its goal to reduce the demand for prostitution by punishing the clients. Here at home, some states have taken cues from Europe. In 2018 in California, the Los Angeles County Regional Human Trafficking Task Force arrested more than five hundred pimps and johns. In spite of some progress, though, the statistics are terrifying: 80 percent of the world population of prostitutes are female and aged thirteen to twenty-five; 90 percent of all prostitutes are dependent on a pimp. The breakdown of arrests is 70 percent female prostitutes and madams, 20 percent male prostitutes and pimps, and 10 percent johns.

  MYTHS AND TRUTHS ABOUT TEENAGE PROSTITUTION

  To get these myths and truths down accurately, I asked one of my girls out of “the life” to write these with me.

  MYTH: Young girls enjoy the sex in prostitution—or at the very least they don’t mind it.

  TRUTH: Prostitutes usually go into an alternate world when they are performing or participating in sex acts. They “check out.”

  MYTH: Some teen girls choose prostitution.

  TRUTH: Pimps recruit girls 98 percent of the time. If a pimp does not put a girl “in the life,” her mother, uncle, father, boyfriend may.

  MYTH: Teen girls make a lot of money as prostitutes.

  TRUTH: Almost all their money goes to their pimp.

  MYTH: Pimps are usually nice to “their girls.”

  TRUTH: They are nice in the beginning to lure the girl, which lasts about two weeks to a month. Often there is physical violence between a pimp and his girls.

  MYTH: You can always choose to get out.

  TRUTH: It can be life threatening to get out of “the life.” Many girls become completely trapped, threatened with beatings, cut with knives, raped, and even killed when they try to leave.

  MYTH: Girls feel sexy and powerful being prostitutes.

  TRUTH: Prostitution demeans girls. Their bodies are scrutinized, they are told they are ugly, fat, too skinny—you name it, they are called it. It is humiliating. I have never spoken to a girl who really felt sexy or powerful when she was in “the life.”

  MYTH: There is no rough sex in teenage prostitution. The johns see to that.

  TRUTH: Johns rape, beat, cut, strangle, spit on, ejaculate on, and smack girls around—and sometimes kill—and the girls have no protection. They are told to just “take it.”

  Of course, the biggest myth of all is that prostitution is not a form of sexual abuse. Looking at these myths and truths, you can see the same dynamics taking place with prostitutes and their pimps and johns that takes place with all other girls and their sexual abusers. The pimp becomes the father/brother/uncle; the pimp becomes that one beloved family member who violates a girl’s trust.

  DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, SAME OLD COERCION: “DO IT FOR DADDY”

  In the beginning, pimps tell girls many of the same things their fathers/uncles/brothers/stepfathers tell them: “You are beautiful, I need you, I will teach you the real way to be a woman.” “Do it for Daddy. I promise you whatever you want.” “You are so special, and this is our little secret.”

  Pimps lure girls the same way uncles offer candy, the same way fathers like Garnet’s tell them they’re princesses and that Daddy needs them to make him happy, the same way that Sage’s cousin was the only one in her family to pay attention to her when her parents were totally preoccupied with their own lives.

  Girls who turn to prostitution come from circumstances where no one protected them. Their families have already done the damage to the girls’ sense of self. Their families have already made them feel that they are not special, smart, worthy, or beautiful. That’s why pimps can so easily convince or control them. They are desperate to find “strong” adults to take care of them.

  When you come right down to it, there’s just not a lot of difference where you’re abused or by whom. Whether the abuse takes place in a middle-class bedroom decorated with pink-flowered wallpaper and shelves of stuffed animals or a cheap motel with urine-stained floors or a topless dancing club or the backseat of a car in an alleyway, girls are being abused and we don’t see it.

  As with the girl who is being sexually abused by her coach, uncle, brother, father, stepfather, there is a lot of secrecy in the world of a girl “in the life.” This girl may very well be going to school every day and facing her peers with her secret, the same way the incest survivor keeps her secret from her peers. The shame and secrecy are the same.

  These are the same invisible girls who are on the soccer team and the only positive attention they get is from their coach. These are the same invisible girls whose mothers tell them that they “must have asked for it” by being too seductive to their stepdads, the same girls at the top private schools whose fathers sneak into their beds at night and rape them.

  It does not matter whether you come from money or you are poor or if you are black or white-Muslim or Jewish: if your family has already made you feel that you are not worthy, you begin to believe it, and when someone comes along and tells you are beautiful/special/wonderful and showers you with attention and gifts, or offers you money when you desperately need it, you are vulnerable and want so much to believe them.

  And if your father has already molested you or your uncle has told you you’re only good for sex, and your mother has found out and told you it is your fault and you deserved it, you may begin to believe it. You may believe you are only good for sex, only good for being used.

  I have known girls to be suicidal because they really believed that was their only worth, and I have had other girls tell me that they may as well trick, because that is all they ever “succeeded” at. These girls use the same words as sexually abused girls. “I check out anyway.” “I stare at the ceiling and then before I realize it, it’s done.” “I go into my own private world.”

  One very big difference can be around how the abuse is enforced. With prostitution there is often the threat of violence; with incest it’s coercion, the promise of gifts or special privileges or love.

  PIMPS AND FRATS

  Another arena where girls are invisibly abused sexually is in fraternity houses on college campuses. In fact, the similarities between pimp culture and frat house culture are startling.

  It’s pretty common in fraternities to try to get girls drunk and take advantage of them. Some frats have even been found to practice a particularly despicable form of gang rape called “pulling the train,” where a girl who is high on drugs or looking for acceptance is dragged into a bedroom and raped by a whole bunch of brothers in turn. They line up like a train and rape this girl over and over and over again. I first discovered this practice in a book called Fraternity Gang Rape. Author and college professor Peggy Reeves Sanday was told about this practice by a female student who had passed out drunk at a Thursday night frat party and was raped by six frat boys who took her up to a room, lined up, and forced themselves on her. Sanday then went on to investigate this kind of rape and found that it’s happening all over.

  In 2014 police investigated a number of rapes at a frat party where University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee frat brothers were color-coding drinks to roofie and rape women. Another despicable act of sexual violence against women that takes place in frats is called the “pig roast.” This is a secret game in which new fraternity members compete to earn points for having sex with overweight women. Only in 2018 did Cornell University, an Ivy League school, denounce this ritual and admit it is contributing to the rape culture on campus.

  Just as in pimp culture, where girls’ bodies are scrutinized and where girls are often “treated to,” or hooked on, powerful drugs to make them more dependent and compliant, frat boys often use “roofies,” or Rohypnol, a hypnotic se
dative and muscle relaxant, to get girls into a kind of trance state, so that they can abuse and rape them without their conscious awareness. Just as “in the life,” where pimps set girls up for forced sex with one man after another, lots of frats practice some form of the rape train. Just the way pimps manipulate, demoralize, and exploit girls, frat boys do the same.

  But sometimes girls get out. And, just like survivors everywhere, they want to tell their stories. They need to tell their stories as part of their healing.

  THE BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS “IN THE LIFE”

  In 1979 an organization called Children of the Night began to rescue teenage girls and boys from life on the streets as prostitutes. By 2017 Children of the Night had rescued more than 10,000 children and teens from prostitution in the United States. And other programs, like GEMS, are also popping up to help these kids. College campuses all over the world now hold annual Take Back the Night demonstrations, where students light candles, have speakers, and protest sexual abuse. In 2014 EROC (End Rape on Campus) was formed by a group of young women. In San Francisco a former prostitute started the SAGE Project (Standing Against Global Exploitation), which has been around for two decades, helping girls get off the streets and providing them with trauma recovery, housing, and legal advocacy.

  We’re making progress, but we have such a long way to go. Our male-dominated culture still does not support saving girls and punishing pimps and johns. Our media still incessantly depict young women as “liking” to be “Lolitas,” using their sexuality to lure older men. We’ve still got work to do.

  Most of the girls I’ve met through my work with GEMS were survivors of sex abuse and trauma before pimps pulled them into “the life.” One of the most interesting things I found is how similar these girls are to the girls whose fathers, brothers, and uncles molested them. They, too, were trapped, they were betrayed, they were forced into sex. Girls “in the life” are no different from any other invisible girl. Not in any ways that matter.

  If you were to talk to a girl from GEMS—most of them from economically challenged homes, girls of color, from the most urban parts of New York City—and then meet a Caucasian, “ all-American” incest survivor from a wealthy home in the rural Midwest, you would find so many commonalities. For starters, most incest survivors talk about not sleeping through the night. They say that they never know when they may hear their fathers’ footsteps coming to their room. Girls in the life talk about being “on call” for their pimps, not sleeping more than a few hours at a time, never knowing when they could be called to work.

  One summer my thrivership fund, Girlthrive, Inc., sponsored a retreat for sexually abused girls. I posted the opportunity on my blog at www.invisiblegirlsthrive.com, and it attracted girls from all over the country, both survivors of date rape and incest and coach abuse and girls who were getting out of prostitution. When these girls were brought together, their degree of mutual understanding and support and recognition was simply amazing. They shared so many common feelings—of guilt and worthlessness, of rejection by their mothers and betrayal by all—and what was most impressive was they all had a deep kindness and inner strength. As one GEMS girl said to an incest survivor, “You are amazing—you have been through so much and you are so strong.” Then another incest survivor turned to a GEMS girl and said, “How can our mothers not know how great we can be?”

  All these girls are invisible girls. No one would ever know from looking at them what they have been through.

  There are differences, of course, and one has to do with what we expect from “nice” girls from “good” homes versus what we expect from girls who have been forced into prostitution who often come from low-income, single-parent homes or foster homes and marginal communities. Our culture does not expect these economically poorer girls, who have ended up in “the life” to go to college or succeed. The culture tends to write them off. But, just as we don’t really know much about the inner lives of girls being abused behind the closed doors of their private homes, we don’t know much about the inner lives of sexually exploited girls “in the life,” either.

  Once these girls have the chance to get out of “the life,” once they are in a more stable environment, be it a program like GEMS, a positive foster home, group home, or with a trusted family member, and when they are given the same opportunity to talk about their experiences of sexual abuse and to come out from under our accusations of being “hoes” and “sluts,” when they begin to realize that the way they were exploited was abuse and not their fault, their own aspirations begin to bloom.

  It may surprise you to know that these invisible girls often also develop some of the same emotional survival techniques as girls from schools and homes filled with opportunity, namely, escape through academics and activities. Many of them are very successful in school and with guidance can be accepted to prestigious colleges, just like girls from privilege. Listen to Ruby Rose’s story and you’ll see.

  RUBY ROSE: FROM THE STREETS TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  When I met Ruby Rose, she was fifteen years old. It had been several months since her arrest for prostitution. Ruby Rose is a cappuccino-skinned Dominican beauty, with intricate, braided hair and beads the colors of the rainbow. She has an infectious laugh and the kind of presence that makes you stop and listen to whatever she has to say. She is graduating from high school this year and has already been accepted with generous scholarships at her three top-choice schools. She is planning on attending Columbia University, President Obama’s alma mater, when all the details of financial aid are worked out.

  Believe me when I say prostitution would be the furthest thing you could imagine when meeting Ruby Rose. She plays the violin and the piano, she was the president of the debate team and the cheerleading team, and she is a gymnastics pro.

  Ruby Rose’s mother was a highly educated woman, a nurse with a full-time job in an urban hospital, when she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was in her late twenties and Ruby Rose was just three years old, her brother one year old. Ruby Rose’s father abandoned them, and from the age of three Ruby Rose had to try to take care of her mother and her brother on her own. Even then, she says, she knew her mother’s lashing out and beating them for no reason was terribly wrong, but she had nowhere to go, and this was her mother. She had to stay.

  Her mother’s illness was controlled with medication, but she did not take it regularly. By the time the children were eleven and thirteen, someone in the community called children’s services, and Ruby Rose and her brother were placed in two separate foster homes for a short time. By then the damage had been done. One of her mother’s boyfriends, whom she was told to call her “uncle,” had sexually abused her starting at age nine. By fourteen she had come into “the life.”

  Ruby Rose doesn’t know where her mother is these days. She doesn’t know if her mother is living in a shelter or on the street. She has not been in touch for the past several months. She worries about her mother but tries to put it out of her mind.

  RUBY ROSE’S STORY

  Flipping Tacos Never Felt So Good

  I love my mother. I do not really understand her sickness. I can remember my mother playing with me and my brother—she was happy and funny and loving. She read to me and played with me—she held me and my brother on her lap. But she also had lots of mood swings. It’s hard for me to hate my mother or blame her for all the abuse I suffered at the hands of her boyfriends—she has a sickness, she cannot help herself. She hears voices, telling her crazy things.

  When my brother and I were very little, my mother worked, and we always had dinners together. She made sure we had baths and clean clothes. But, when her sickness got worse, she would forget to feed us or bathe us. But my brother and I still wanted to stay with her.

  When I started kindergarten my brother was only four years old, and I was afraid to leave him at home alone with my mother. At that time, my mother slept a lot, and I was always worried about my little brother being alone with her like th
at. When I think back on it now, I guess I was like a little adult trying to make everything all right. It was such a relief when my brother and I were in the same school. We would walk to school together the ten blocks from our apartment in Harlem.

  Things were pretty bad at home. Sometimes my mother would just beat us for no reason. When she did not take her medication, she was psychotic—she heard voices and the voices told her to hit us sometimes, and sometimes she thought people were talking about her and saying bad things. She used to make me go to the bodega [corner store] for her because she thought that the guy there was after her.

  I don’t remember the specifics until I was about nine years old. My mother had lots of different “boyfriends.” Even though I was just a kid, some of them were attracted to me, and many of them would come into my bedroom and touch me. I told my mother, but she said not to worry about it.

  She had one particular boyfriend who she knew liked me. I was ten then. He used to pick me up in the middle of the night and bring me to his disgusting, dirty apartment in Staten Island and rape me. After he raped me he would give me money to give to my mother “for the rent.” Sometimes I would be fast asleep and she would wake me up at around 1:00 in the morning and tell me to go with “Uncle Jason,” and even though I would cry and say he was hurting me and raping me, she told me, “We need the rent money—he likes you—just deal with it.”