Girls Like Us Response

"Many girls, even in this country [emphasis mine], are growing up in a society that does not provide real and viable opportunities for the future. At the same time, they're living in a culture that increasingly teaches them that their worth and value are defined by their sexuality. Parallels can be found between girls in poverty in this country and girls in poverty internationally, as well as with girls growing up over one hundred years ago. In an article on the commercial sexual exploitation of girls and the abolitionist movement in Victorian England, author Deborah Gorham writes of a young woman who "allowed herself to be entrapped in a French brothel because life had given her little reason to believe that any genuinely satisfactory possibility existed for her. In a society that told a girl who had no possessions that her chastity, at least, was a 'precious possession,' some young girls might well have been led to believe that they might as well sell that possession to the highest bidder." If the word chastity were replaced by sexuality or body, then this paragraph could easily have been written about commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls today in the United States" (82).

As I read Rachel Lloyd, I find myself becoming increasingly frustrated at the disempowerment she clearly believes is not only inherent to the forcible domestic trafficking of young girls, but also sex work in general. Though that passage is concerned with "girls," the fact remains that she talks about sex work as an absolute indignity, the universal product of girls not believing they have more to offer the world than their "bodies." In flashing to memories of herself as a young girl, scared and exploited, Lloyd seems to imply that her story is the norm, or worse, that she got off easy. Part of this discourse is explaining that prostitution often includes forcible victimization in the form of unreported rape. Often, when rape is reported, it is not taken seriously by people in power, leading to a hierarchy that treats prostitutes as less than human (126). Yet rather than question the neoliberal economic policies that force girls/women to feel that prostitution is desirable or at least passable labor that involves informed consent, or engage with a discourse that dehumanizes women in any way, regardless of their choices, Lloyd resorts to comments about women lacking self-respect due to the culture, and in no way recognizes those choices as affirmative. Furthermore, she uses the crutch of Western difference and American exceptionalism to reaffirm the arbitrary division of "us" vs. "them," "over here" and "over there."

Rachel Lloyd's perspective is clearly shaping a macro-level discourse of consent and the universality of sex work as social ill. Human trafficking and sex work as viewed from an abolitionist perspective have become fashionable social issues, which is how we end up with articles such as "Child Sex Trafficking Growing in the U.S.: 'I Got My Childhood Taken From Me'." In presenting human trafficking from the perspective of Demi Moore, a celebrity face for abolitionism, as well as through the lens of conservative politics, as with the quotation from a Republican representative, this article is complicit in the meaning-making of sex trafficking victims as the products of a broken system or flawed family structures. Because she is so young, obviously the girl discussed is not presented as having a choice, yet I find Girls Like Us and articles of this ilk to be much too interested in this poverty-based, possibly racialized narrative, as though it is enough to say that not receiving enough love at home because of financial constraints is a nuanced analysis. The individual reasons should be delved into more thoroughly, as that determines so much about how people respond to this choice discourse.

Works Cited

Khan, Huma. "Child Sex Trafficking Growing in the U.S.: 'I Got My Childhood Taken From Me'" ABC News. ABC News Network, 05 May 2010. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. <http://abcnews.go.com/US/domestic-sex-trafficking-increasing-united-states/story?id=10557194>.