This is what empowerment looks like: Rachel Lloyd speaks!

Imagine, if you need to imagine, growing up in a home with an alcoholic mother, one who swallows pills while you’re right in the room. Rather than ask for help, she encourages your young, teenage self, to go out clubbing, so she, unbeknownst to you, can die. This is the world that Rachel Lloyd, author of  Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds her Calling and Heals Herself
grows up in. Girls Like Us is the best book I’ve read in a quite some time. It’s around 250 pages, but the reading goes quickly, at least if you’re like me, and not sickness nor homework can make you put the book down!

For those of you for whom the name “Rachel Lloyd” does not ring a bell, Lloyd is the founder of the organization GEMS. GEMS assists girls and young women in getting out of “the life,” a name commonly used to refer to the world of paid rape (i.e. prostitution). While most of the book focuses on the individual stories, struggles, successes, and relapses, of girls in GEMS, what makes the book so powerful is that Lloyd interweaves her own tale of sexual exploitation and trafficking to make her points clearer.  While arguing against the glamorization of pimping, she also explains that girls stay with their pimps for a reason. Indeed, Lloyd asks: why is it that the feminist movement no longer blames women for staying with batterers, but still sees women as making a choice to stay with a pimp? She also points out that pimps provide girls with things they desire, material things such as food, clothing, and shelter, but also a feeling of home. She describes girls who are found by pimps the first hour they get off the train after running away from a home that was not really a home. Pimps do not have to provide adolescents and pre-adolescents with much for them to feel cared for. Indeed, one GEMS participant describes going to a “fancy restaurant” for dinner; Lloyd later finds out the restaurant is Red Lobster, a popular chain restaurant in parts of the U.S.  As I have been in an abusive relationship(s), this analogy made a lot of sense to me. Not everything was bad all the time. But eventually there becomes a point where the cons outweigh whatever one is getting from the relationship.

While Lloyd does describe pimps as an integral part of the lives of the girls she works with, it is important to note that not everyone who is prostituted has a pimp. Sometimes women end up prostituting themselves, for any of a myriad of reasons, most especially money, mental illness, and addiction.  This may occur after pimping. I don’t want readers who have prostituted themselves for money or any other reason to feel badly reading this, as selling one’s body simply could not happen if there wasn’t a demand for it. Nor if women weren’t solely seen as The Sex Class.

Lloyd discusses choice in a brilliant way. After leaving a mother that could not take care of her, Lloyd ends up spending all day in a German city, desperately attempting to find a job.  As she is not old enough to legally work and can only speak a word or two of German, she gets turned down from absolutely every place she looks for work. Without money and desperate for food, she sees a sign that says, Girls, Girls, Girls. This is how Lloyd makes the “choice” to work in a strip club–only until she can earn enough money to go back to her mother–but ends up meeting her pimp, JP, there (75).

Lloyd writes, “For a long time I’ve felt guilty about the way I entered the sex industry.” She has been told straight out that since she was “older” than most of the girls she works with (seventeen) “obviously she made a choice (77).” This kind of judgement is exactly what survivors fear from telling “square” people.  This is not even to mention how harshly women judge themselves for their “choices.” That is why Lloyd tells the young women of GEMS that they need to forgive themselves in order to alleviate their profound sense of shame. Lloyd says to them, “Whatever you thought you had to do to survive or stay alive, it’s okay (77).”  She does note that it’s easier to see the girls lack of choices as just that when looking at them from an outsiders perspective; when looking at one’s own life, it’s easier to say, “why didn’t I do X, Y, or Z?”

Lloyd’s book focuses on underage girls, even though Lloyd herself fights for abolition for all women and prostituted persons. She wonders why there are people–and I have encountered them as well–who think it’s perfectly fine for a 16-year-old to make the “choice” to enter the sex industry, when most parents are wary to give their car keys to a child that age (80)! Even if an adult woman does “choose” to enter the sex industry, there is no way she can no what she is getting herself into, or how she will never quite fit into the square world again.  Always, there will be a wall, thin as glass, between you and the outside world.

For example, when Lloyd began working at the strip club, she had no idea this would eventually lead her to JP, who attempts to kill her on several occasions. With a knife at her throat, Lloyd must repeat that she loves JP and will not be unloyal. This begins at 3:14 a.m. and she must continue repeating the words, knife at throat, until 8:30 in the morning (151).

Lloyd describes another near-death experience, when a man she is seeing, Mike, drives her to a ditch in an attempt to murder her. However, she begs him to believe her when she says there is no one else she is seeing, and he “relents”–by making her take her shoes and socks off and run after the car for well over an hour. Lloyd’s feet are covered in blood by the time this exercise is over. Once back on the road with Mike, she runs out of the car and escapes to the police station.  The police bring in Mike, but he makes up a story that she likes rough sex, and male cops being male cops, they buy it (122). Notably, there is a woman officer at the station who believes her, but she is not able to make the cops arrest Mike. Nor is she able to make Mike give back all of her savings he stole, which he now claims are his.

Although Lloyd leaves out many of the details of her time in the life, these stories by themselves are obviously incredibly disturbing. What kind of person would just say “prostitution should be decriminalized!” after reading this book, I find myself wondering. And yet, Lloyd has faced criticism from the left, apparently for being too religious. I find this extremely odd, because Lloyd rarely discusses religion, and certainly doesn’t preach it to her readers. If one actually reads her book, one will see she finds people who care about her in the church community. This acts as a crutch for her to move forward with her  feminist and progressive, passions. This is not to say finding a higher power isn’t helpful to her, as it is to many people–including women and men in groups such as A.A.

I worry those who read this review will believe it is another incredibly depressing book about sex trafficking. But despite the horrors Lloyd so eloquently articulates, she is not only a survivor, but a thriver. She starts GEMS out of an act of desperation–you’ll have to read the book to find out all the details–but she now is able to provide the kind of support she would have wanted to get out of the life to female  youth in NYC.

Oh, and Lloyd writes in her Acknowledgements: Thanks to my mother for supporting me in telling my story. I love you much and always, and I’m so glad we have the beautiful relationship  that we now have. I’m proud of you and thankful you’re my mom. Truly.

It’s nice to know that some relationships are mendable.