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

Lloyd describes her early years conducting outreach for a missionary agency at Rikers Island High School in the fall of 1997 in New York City. The prison has an oppressive smell, “thick and heavy with misery” (25). At the time Lloyd is 22. At first the teenagers are stand-offish, but they start to warm up when they hear Lloyd’s British accent; they beg Lloyd to repeat Spice Girls quotes, and she obliges them. After Lloyd shares her own experience as an exploited teenage sex worker, the teenagers open up to her about their stories.

While by day Lloyd visits detention centers and shelters for the missionary agency, at night she performs outreach on the streets, which is a harrowing experience. Slowly but surely, she meets a number of young girls who are “in the life.” Through these girls, Lloyd comes to realize that helping them leave the life is a long, often repetitive process. She learns the importance of having faith in these girls over time. Looking back, Lloyd also realizes that she was trying to make sense of her own trauma through helping these girls.

Lloyd describes her teenage suicide attempt and her troubled home life, which led her into sexual exploitation. During the suicide attempt in the English winter of 1989, Lloyd consumes 40 of her mother’s pills at the age of 13. Before Lloyd’s suicide attempt, her own mother tried to take her own life after Lloyd’s stepfather, Robert, left. Lloyd remembers that when she was young her mother did not show signs of alcoholism. She recalls a bright spot in her early childhood when she lived with her great-grandmother in the countryside of Dorset. Things changed when her mother met Robert, which her mother tells Lloyd was “the worst mistake of her life” (44). Her mother returns from her honeymoon with Robert with marks on her throat after he tried to choke her on the ferry back from France. Not long after, Robert hits Lloyd and drags her screaming by her hair up a long flight of stairs. Lloyd recalls working long hours at factories in England as an underage laborer, both for money and to stay away from her dysfunctional family.

In the summer of 1997, Lloyd arrives in New York City to start her new job at The Little Sister Project, a ministry for adult women in the sex industry. After her coworkers take Lloyd sightseeing, they bring her to her new home in Spanish Harlem. At first, Lloyd is fearful of the neighborhood as it appears rough when she arrives at night, but she falls in love with it after seeing the sense of community there in the light of day. In New York, Lloyd begins to understand the effect that national crises such as the crack epidemic and AIDS have on the growth of the sex industry, particularly for children of color.

Lloyd outlines her painful memories of Christmases past. On Christmas Eve in 1988, her mother begs her to go out and find Robert amidst the festivities on Albert Road, their town’s main street. Lloyd describes her mother in this moment as “a deflated balloon” (64). While out with friends, Lloyd spots Robert with another woman. On Christmas Eve 1990, Lloyd’s mother again urges her to go out, and Lloyd obliges her with some suspicion. When Lloyd returns at four o’clock in the morning, she finds her mother has attempted suicide—one of several times she does so over the years.

Like Lloyd, many sexually exploited young women and girls have painful memories of their families. The holidays are a hard time for the girls as they remind them of their fractured relationships. Lloyd recalls one girl, Monica, who writes a poem about her negligent mother, her sisters, who are also sexually exploited, her incestuous brother, and her absentee father. Another girl, Sarah, makes a Christmas wish to patch things up with her mother that Lloyd knows will not be fulfilled. Lloyd draws a parallel between these dysfunctional family relationships and the relationship between sexually exploited girls and their pimps, whom they often refer to as “Daddy.” Lloyd maintains that often these men are the first people in these girls’ lives to show them any kindness or model a semblance of familial love.