Girls Like Us: Fighting For a World Where Girls Are Not For Sale

Lloyd remembers the multiple attempts that her boyfriend JP made on her life in the summer of 1994 in Germany. She realizes after she left him and “the life” that “perhaps it hadn’t been all my fault” (185). In Lloyd’s early days working with underage victims, she is also working through her own trauma. Lloyd, like many of the victimized girls she works with, loves her aggressor. Lloyd identifies this phenomenon as “Stockholm syndrome,” in which a victim latches on to a small act of kindness within a greater dangerous act. Lloyd explains the phenomenon as “the desire to perceive kindness where there is none, or to magnify small, inconsequential acts of basic human decency to proportions worthy of gratitude and love […]” (196). 

Lloyd explains the painful process of leaving the sex industry and learning to acclimate to normal life. Lloyd describes the period of euphoria, fueled by anger, relief, and freedom, that follows leaving. Afterwards, however, “[…] the day-to-dayness of mundane reality begins to sink in” (214). She points out the many transitions exploited girls and women must make, including finding alternative employment and completing their educations. Lloyd recalls her own escape from abuse in Germany in 1994. She starts nannying, cannot afford to buy new clothes, and has an affair with a married man. In the throes of understanding the trauma that sexual exploitation left in its wake, Lloyd says, “Normal is a concept that I’m still figuring out” (216).  

The road to recovery from sexual exploitation is not always straight. Lloyd recounts her own lingering feelings for her former pimp, and her attempts to contact him. For many exploited girls, contact with their former pimp is inescapable as they live in the same neighborhood. There may be emotional repercussions to losing trust in someone they formerly had faith in. After the initial pain and shock of leaving wears off, it is not uncommon for many exploited children to return to their pimps. Lloyd maintains, “For so many girls, it’s easier to go back and reconstruct the carefully built walls of denial than face the fact that they were manipulated, used, played” (255). Lloyd points out that very few relationships are all bad, and that incidents of violence and trauma are often juxtaposed with everyday intimacies like cooking, sleeping, and watching TV.