These Girls Could Be My Sisters

Photo illustration by Yasmin Miller | VOX Staff

By Yasmin Miller | VOX Staff

Nine months ago if someone had ever brought up the term prostitute, the image that would have come to mind was one of a woman, being used by men to get a cheap sexual thrill. The same would go for prostitution. In my head was the picture of a strung-out older woman who walked up and down the sidewalks of some shady side of town selling her body to support a drug habit or a “pimp” who she realized was using her. I really believed that prostitution and the other forms of sexual exploitation only happened to people who had somehow asked to be put in these situations. I had pictured someone who was indifferent and untrusting to everyone and everything. Subconsciously, I think I was so afraid of the taboo subject and the people who were a part of it that I tried to create a barrier between myself and the problem without even being aware of its intricacies. But an image that I never would have thought of would have been a regular girl around my age, 16, forgotten and innocent. Yet this is exactly what I discovered when I met and worked with the girls of Angela’s House, a safe house for teenage girls who have been sexually exploited.

Getting Ready for the Truth First I participated in a learning workshop to prepare for our writing workshop with girls living at Angela’s House. LaKendra Baker, former project manager for the Center to End Adolescent Sexual Exploitation, had us listen to demeaning, yet popular songs about women, and then made us truly think about what the lyrics meant. She told us about the realities of the world of sexual exploitation for young girls — how the girls were preyed on, how they so often fell into the world of prostitution and exploitation in very mundane and very scary ways. Baker told us that the problem, though frighteningly silent, was huge, so huge in fact that Atlanta is considered one of the top U.S. cities for the sexual exploitation of children. I learned that every day in Atlanta and many other U.S. cities, girls as young as 7 are being sold in person and via the Internet. Evidently there are many men (and even some women) who prefer those who are younger because they think kids and teenagers are “cleaner” or more “innocent.” By the time Baker left the office, my head was pounding. I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around all that I had learned, and the fact that I hadn’t even started on this Girls’ Group project made me dread that eventually we would have to go and begin the workshop. We had been introduced to the realities of child sexual exploitation only a week before we started working with girls. In the days following, all the way up until the day when we first drove to Angela’s House, I seriously considered calling VOX and saying I just couldn’t handle it.

Meeting the Girls The first day to meet the girls at Angela’s House came too quickly, and I found myself sitting in the backseat of Rachel’s (our adult supporter) van with my fellow volunteers Keosha and Marjon — and the three of us were uncharacteristically quiet. Rachel was constantly reassuring us, telling us that we would do fine. But no matter how encouraging her words were, I was nervous anyway.

Walking up to the large, pretty house, my anxiety was almost too much to bear. Keosha made some small offhand comment, I can’t even remember what it was, and we all broke into nervous titters. It was Rachel who rang the doorbell as Keosha, Marjon and I all looked anywhere but at the door. But when it opened, I was surprised to find a girl around my age, bright eyed and pretty, who led us into the living room where three other girls sat on couches. Nervously peeking around, I realized that the girls were looking at us not with mean, angry faces, but rather that they looked just as curious as we felt. We introduced ourselves shyly to one another. Then Keosha, Marjon and I told them what we were there for, and we quickly jumped into the workshop. This first workshop was sort of a getting-to-know-each-other type of thing, and I realized something — I had a lot in common with the girls, not just things like favorite colors and tastes in music, but stuff on even more basic levels. We looked at life from the same points of view; we giggled at the same jokes.

Like Sisters to Me There are times when the girls I’ve met seem like sisters to me. If I can’t find something in them that reminds me of myself then there’s always something that reminds me of someone else I know. Looking back I think the reason that I was so afraid of meeting the girls at Angela’s House had nothing to do with the girls themselves. What I was truly scared about was learning the truth of their situations.

One truth I was surprised about was that almost everything these girls did to fall prey to sexual exploitation and wind up at Angela’s House had been done out of love. They were almost always exploited by someone they knew and were close to. A lot of times it was a boyfriend.

It made me scared to think that the girls’ desire to love someone and in return be loved — a perfectly normal and human feeling — had been so twisted and used to the advantage of the pimps. After I got to know the girls better, after I got to love them, this knowledge of how they were manipulated and abused made me angry. I kept thinking, Who would do something like this? The question still goes unanswered and my anger has not subsided. VOX’s Girls Group program taught me that there’s really no difference from the girls at Angela’s House (and probably most other girls who have been sexually exploited) and myself. When I first heard about this huge and silent problem, I thought that the victims were somehow different than me.

But this is just not the case at all. The only difference between these girls and me or other girls is that they found themselves put into a series of situations that we never have had the misfortune to experience. But given different circumstances, it could easily have happened to us, too.

Yasmin is a junior at Riverside High.