26 pages • 52 minutes read
Rachel LloydGirls Like Us: Fighting For a World Where Girls Are Not For Sale
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Distrust of Institutions
Lloyd illustrates how the lack of support systems that children who have been sexually exploited face leads to a strong distrust of institutions. The foster agency in the book’s Prologue is ill-equipped to handle crises of sexual exploitation. The New York State Senate refuses to pass legislation that protects the girls. The teachers at Rikers Detention Center are dismissive and offensive about the issues that girls who have been sexually exploited must contend with, even to Lloyd. In Chapter 3, the reader learns about how law enforcement, both domestically and abroad, dismisses cases of gender violence, causing victims to turn away from law enforcement for protection. Lloyd retells her experience being kidnapped in Germany by an abusive boyfriend, who takes her to a rural area, beats her, and abandons her. When Lloyd finally gets to a police station, the male policeman is dismissive of her claims that her ex-boyfriend has kidnapped, hit, and robbed her. When Mike, the ex-boyfriend, arrives at the station, he claims that the 3,000 marks he stole from Lloyd are his, and he is released. After learning that Lloyd works at a strip club, the policeman dismisses her claims and suggests that she get a ride home with Mike.
As in the case of GEMS client Keisha, many of the girls equate public institutions like Child Protective Services as a means of separating them from the little family that they have, be they their own families or the adopted dysfunctional family system created by their pimp. Using both fact and personal anecdote, Lloyd maps the ways in which the inability or unwillingness of these institutions to help disenfranchised girls leads to their recruitment and abuse within the sex industry. By highlighting these gaps in support, Lloyd emphasizes the importance of organizations such as GEMS, which understand firsthand what exploited girls go through and can partner with law enforcement and government institutions that are not prepared to protect victims of the sex industry.
The Influence of Family
Throughout the book, Lloyd draws on her own family experiences to map out the timeline of how she entered into sexual exploitation. Though she receives love from her great-grandmother early on in life, her mother’s alcoholism, abusive relationships, and extreme depression and suicidal tendencies drive Lloyd into poverty, loneliness, and romantic dysfunction. To escape her mother and stepfather, and to survive on her own, Lloyd begins to work in factories at a young age. After being stuck in Germany, Lloyd is forced to start working at a strip club, which leads her into sexual exploitation.
Lloyd ties her own story to those of the girls she works with, citing familial trauma as one of the indicators of vulnerability to sex trafficking. In Chapter 3, Lloyd notes, “Girls get their hearts broken more times by their families than by any guy […]” (71). Thus, Lloyd begins to unravel the psychological causes and effects of sexual exploitation, later linking these experiences to post-traumatic stress disorder and Stockholm syndrome and advocating for holistic rather than punitive solutions to sexual exploitation.
The Dangerous Repercussions of Gender and Racial Bias
Lloyd addresses how language is in and of itself gendered. She closely analyzes the lack of accountability that Johns and pimps hold, both in the eyes of the law and in the court of public opinion. While pimps’ experiences are dramatized on television and praised at music award shows, victims of sexual abuse are characterized as dirty, irresponsible, and hypersexual. Lloyd describes the inherently racialized nature of these perceptions, noting that white victims such as JonBenét Ramsey receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage compared to their counterparts of color, such as Diamond and Tionda Bradley, Teekah Lewis, and Jahi Turner. Lloyd notes, “It is clear that race and class make a difference in how much of a victim we believe you are” (171).
Lloyd analyzes the long-term effects of using euphemisms like “young women” to refer to pre-teen and teenage girls who have been sexual exploited, or the word “prostitute” to refer to victims. Lloyd notes that these differences affect the way the public sees abused children as well as how they are prosecuted and criminalized in court. In the majority of cases described in Girls Like Us, sexually exploited victims are held accountable and imprisoned for the abuses they suffer at the hands of pimps.
