Abstract
Girls Like Us is not a typical memoir. In fact, it could be considered a primer for activists, a toolkit for policy makers, and a textbook for educating students and professionals through the recounting of the author’s life. Framed by her personal experience of exploitation and her current practice with young girls and women in “the life,” Lloyd presents a thorough and compelling description of the children and youths who are victimized in the commercial sex industry in the United States. Commercially sexually exploited children (CSEC) are forced and/or coerced into prostitution, pornography, and other illicit activities.
In Girls Like Us, Lloyd connects her personal experience directly to the social systems that support and reinforce CSEC. She also relays how she learned about others’ experiences, both similar to and different from her own, inspiring her to find what has become the highly respected and influential organization GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services) in New York City. Girls Like Us illustrates her quest for more astute learning as an advocate about the immediate and long-term needs of exploited girls and strategies to meet those needs in respectful, age appropriate, trauma informed, and empowering ways. She also describes groundbreaking legislative advocacy spurred by her own background and that of other survivors.
Most writing on human trafficking is either purely academic or purely memoir. Scholarly articles often lack the gripping honesty, integrity, and inspiration found in first-person narratives. Girls Like Us also stands out from existing memoirs because it avoids cheap sensationalism and is strongly supported by the author’s professional, political, and programmatic background and expertise. It is beautifully written and grounded in the pain and injustice of exploitation, while building on the courage and resilience of survivor leaders.
In Girls Like Us, and inherent in the work of GEMS, the author redefines power. She illustrates negotiations of power to make quotidian life decisions and to affect change in policies that affect exploited girls. Using meaning making through social action, legislative advocacy, and the leadership of survivors, this notion of power and control is redefined from the experience of exploitation to the process of transitioning out of “the life.” The author avoids convenient dichotomies of “prostituted girl” versus “rescued child,” painting a more complex, nuanced, and accurate picture of modern slavery in communities across the United States.
Community after community hold GEMS up as a model program. This book lays Lloyd’s accomplishments, initiatives, and conceptual framework open and accessible to a wide range of scholars, activists, survivors, and community members engaged in the movement to create communities in which girls are not bought and sold. Whether it be used as a book club selection or a college textbook, Girls Like Us is adaptable and useful in raising awareness, informing policy, developing services and programs, and driving a research agenda.
The book arrived on bookshelves at a time when policy and services were focused almost solely on foreign-born victims of forced labor and sex trafficking. Girls Like Us has been influential in directing national and local dialogue to include the children of the United States as we struggle to identify those who have been affected by CSEC, design programs to meet the needs of survivors, hold perpetrators accountable, and prevent future exploitation.
In the end, Girls Like Us is a story about what it means to address social injustice—a superbly crafted story told from multiple perspectives—as the founder of GEMS; a policy advocate; a survivor, and the friend, mentor, and voice of countless survivors. The experience of reading Girls Like Us creates both outrage and hope among readers. It will entice some readers to seek additional reading, research, and training and will move others to action. Among most readers, however, it holds the promise of spurring both learning and engagement.