Last night, I went to a benefit for GEMS, an organization that helps girls who have been victims of commercial sexual exploitation. The benefit included a screening of the Showtime documentary Very Young Girls, a film that chronicles the struggles of some of the girls served by GEMS as they try to leave the sex trade, with varying degrees of success. It starts with the sobering statistic, brought to us by the US Department of Justice, that the average age of entry into prostitution in the US is thirteen.
Thirteen.
Our first subject, a straight-A student throughout junior high school, was twelve years old when she was walking down the street and found herself followed by a man in a car. The man told her she was beautiful, convinced her to get in his car, then took her to a hotel and had sex with her. After two weeks of "honeymoon," she says, where she repeatedly had sex with this thirty-five-year-old man who was promising to marry her, he insisted that she start prostituting herself to prove her love and loyalty to him. Which she did, for years, and when she tried to escape him, she was beaten and raped.
You could kind of hear people in the audience trying to tamp down their reactions -- clearing their throats quietly, breathing hard through their noses -- trying to be cool, trying to pretend that we all know this stuff happens, this isn't shocking to us, we're not that naive. And we're all looking at her baby face, at all of the girls' baby faces as they tell their stories, and we're dying.
It was when the footage of the pimps came on screen that the real out-loud reactions started. Home video footage of these two guys rolling around in a car, talking to the young girls with blurred faces they'd hailed over to their rolled-down window. A girl gets sweet-talked into the car; soon, she is sweet-talked into turning a trick. When she gets back in the car, the blur slips to the lower half of her face so we can see the devastation in her eyes. What's wrong, the pimps chide her, and tears roll down her face. Nothin', she says; I just never did nothin' like that before.
The pimps, we learn, filmed their encounters with this girl and others over the course of a few weeks; they were hoping to make a reality show about their lives. We see the girl again and again; see her threatened with two fingers to her temple (this is what happens if you try to leave); see her slapped by another girl at the pimps' behest (again, harder, now on the other side, even it out); see her respond to their prompts (what you gotta do to make Daddy love you again -- make money, that's right). This is when I started to hear it, the tight hiss of held breath escaping in disgust from between clenched teeth. From me, and everyone around me.
About sixty or seventy minutes into it, we see GEMS founder Rachel Lloyd, who started the organization out of her apartment ten years ago and has grown it into a full shelter serving more than 200 girls a year, who we've watched throughout the film as she leads therapy groups, motivating and protecting her young charges, even flying to Miami to negotiate with a girl who left GEMS to get back with her pimp (and how we collectively sighed with audible, premature relief when the girl took that plane ticket) -- Rachel has just been awarded the 2005 Reebok Human Rights Award. She's on stage, in front of a cheering crowd, reminding them that the Oscar for Best Song has just gone to a song called "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp."
She spits the word pimp, and I want to spit with her. These disgusting child rapists, these adults who sell children to other adults -- "It's not hard out there for a pimp," she thunders, thumping the podium. "It's hard out there for a thirteen-year-old girl who has been the victim of sexual exploitation!"
And we all go nuts. Cheering, clapping, and letting those sobs we've been choking back escape in big gulping gasps. Rachel Lloyd. Thank fucking god.
The movie ends with a round up of Where The Girls Are Now. Some of them are all right. Some of them are not. Some of them are with us in the audience tonight, and they join Rachel and the film's directors on stage for a Q&A.
During the Q&A, someone asks about some of the scenes from the film, where fourteen and fifteen-year-old girls are sentenced to juvenile detention for the crime of prostitution, though they are not old enough to legally consent to sex (the adult johns who've paid for sex with these children, meanwhile, are slapped on the wrist, released, and given the opportunity to clear their records after six months). What kind of legislation should we be supporting to stop judges and prosecutors from punishing the victims of these crimes?
Damn if she didn't take the words out of my mouth. Turns out it's called the Safe Harbor Act, and it's been stalled in the New York State Legislature, which, until recently, was headed by former New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer. Who was removed from office for having sex with prostitutes.
Another question comes from a beautifully groomed woman with white hair. She wants to know about the feasibility of establishing a safe house upstate for the GEMS girls, a house that's further away from the pimps who seek to lure them back to the strolls just a subway ride away. How much money do you need, she asks. And damn if I wasn't about to ask that same thing, too.
Short answer: Whadda you got? They can use it. Got money? Great. Got time to devote to the cause? Great. Got some clothes you want to donate; maybe you want to give a computer? They'll take it. But what's most important, says Rachel, is that you give your awareness; that you share what you learned from the film and the brave girls who were its subjects with everyone you know. That when someone talks about how glamorous the sex industry can be, or how the girls are asking for it, or how men have needs and it's always been this way and we should just legalize it already because what's the harm, that you stop and put them in touch with the reality of it.
So I wrote my check, and I'm putting together a clothing drive, and I'm writing this post right now. And I swear to god, the next person who uses the word pimp in a facetious manner is going to get an earful from me. Pimp is not funny. It's not cute. It doesn't mean to promote in a beneficial way, or to make something better and shinier, like it does on MTV. It means to sexually and emotionally abuse people, mostly children.
It's hard out there tonight for girls just a few blocks from my house. Ninth Avenue. Hunts Point. Bedford-Stuyvesant. It's hard, even for the ones who got out of the life, the ones who are at GEMS right now, sitting in therapy group with Rachel, talking about how they still sometimes miss the men who turned them out. If you can do anything to make it easier, I urge you to contribute what you can to GEMS.
And if you can kick a pimp or a john in the balls, so much the better.
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