Get them while their Young

The popularity of the lifestyle of “pimps” and hoes” is because of the false glamorization that has occurred in the mainstream media through music and movies. I think if people do recognize the negative side of this lifestyle, they tend to view the victims, the women, negatively and blame them because of their bad life choices, usually referring to the men they were involved with and drug addiction. I find this view very ignorant and making a quick justification of why these women shouldn’t be given sympathy and outreach. At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I saw a documentary called Very Young Girls. From the title and the time that it was on cable, I was under the assumption that it was going to be something of resemblance of soft-core porn. However to my surprise, it was about young women who currently or in the past were a prostitute in Queens, NY.

I attempted to upload the Very Young Girls Trailer but kept getting an error. Till I figure it out, here is the link to the trailer.

In the film, these young women were interviewed and told their stories to the camera and in a support group setting. Most of these girls were starting to sell themselves around 12-14 years old after they were involved with a pimp. The film shows pimps searching for these girls and the women tell how and why they stay. There are clear social and economic factors that caused these particular girls to be targeted. These girls tend to the ethnic. Most of the young girls were either from households with parents who were drug addicted; they may have been being abused physically and or sexually; their families were poor or they had no family at all. These pimps took the place of their families and became a controlling, abusive, lover instead of the caregiver they promised to be.

These young girls in Queens have an organization called Girls Education and Mentoring Services, GEMS, which aims to help them specifically get out of prostitution and back to a happy production life. The founder of GEMS and the producer of the film is Rachel Lloyd. Rachel Lloyd has done research and has written about this issue and herself was involved in prostitution in her youth.

Rachel Lloyd talking to one of the young girls she works with.

In an article Rachel Lloyd wrote in Encounter titled “Acceptable Victims? Sexually Exploited Youth in the U.S.”, she addresses the media’s influence of creating acceptance of this problem. I found the lyric from 50 cents’ song P.I.M.P that she points out as interesting. The lyric was “I ain’t gotta give ’em much, they happy with Mickey D’s”. 50 cent claims the lyrics are referring to adult women in prostitution, not young girls. Lloyd, of course, made the argument young girls can be appeased with McDonald’s more often than older women. I would have never paid any attention to that lyric before I started to look into this issue because before seeing this film I was only presented and told of youth prostitution and sex trafficking stories from other countries.

I found the topic interesting so I wrote a research paper on it. Just several days after I turned in my paper, there was a news story about a child being sold as a sex slave. Unfortunately, the young girl was found dead. Knowledge and awareness is key to creating any social change. The media makes this very difficult by presenting what is opposite of the reality, which leads many to believe what they have been shown because they see that more than the realities. A story that has came to my attention recently, that I find rather disturbing, is that of a high school girl who was the victim of rape by one of her school’s football players. The young girl is a cheerleader at her high school; after the incident occurred, she was told that she would have to cheer the name of the boy who raped her. She refused to cheer his name and was then kicked off of the cheer leading squad. Her family tried to take the school to court over the actions; the school won the court case and is not trying to make the family of the girl pay their legal fees of $35,000. I find cases like this to show the negative turn in our cultural and society’s moral conscience. I find it very sad that this would be occurring to any individual, but especially at the high school level. It is just increasing the likely hood of the public to demonize and punish the victim when she was doing nothing wrong but just protesting an action and attempting to use her freedom of speech.