Empowering the survivors

“I’d like to tell you that that was the end of my story. It was not,” she said.

By that point, she was a teenage mother who came from “a lot of dysfunction” — an alcoholic father, a “tough” mother who never told her she loved her. Her daughter’s father was pressuring Morrissey to provide for him, but she was “no good at shoplifting,” she said. Caught up in the scene at the Combat Zone, she ended up selling herself on the streets, where a light-skinned black girl like her, the target of ridicule in her neighborhood, was popular with men.

She soon learned to tell the difference between a john and an undercover cop. She lived among “the misfits” for 14 years, developing a serious drug habit in the meantime. By the time she was 30, was turning tricks for $5.

Pregnant with her second child in 1993, Morrissey said she had “a moment of clarity” and went into detox. She has been clean since May of that year and since 2004 has been running groups and mentoring girls like her through My Life My Choice, a Boston-based Justice Research Institute program aimed at fighting exploitation and trafficking of girls.

They provide the girls with education, health care, leadership, job training — whatever they need. “We meet the girls where they are,” said Morrissey, now 52.

Sometimes, that place is very rough. She recently took one girl and her child to the doctor. Both mother and baby were in pediatric care.

There are many obstacles that block a trafficked girl’s path out of exploitation — laws and institutions that often fail them, damaged adults who trade on their bodies and a community that casts harsh moral judgment. But there is also help.

In most major U.S. cities, there are nonprofit groups and networks of social workers, volunteers and even former survivors like Morrissey.

They scour the streets and answer calls from referring agencies at all hours, working to stitch together the busted social safety net, making all the difference in the life of a girl in trouble.

Among these activists and agitators is Andrea Powell, the executive director of FAIR Girls, which is based in Washington, D.C., and helps trafficked girls get back in school, find jobs and get medical help.

She runs her outfit out of an address with an undisclosed location — pimps tend to go looking for their girls — and secret apartments that shelter girls referred to her by police or social services.

“I’ve seen everything, trust me,” said Powell. But even she is occasionally shocked. She recalled an incident when a social worker called her about a 10-year-old girl who had been picked up outside a local strip club.

“She’s promiscuous. She can’t keep her legs together,” the social worker told Powell, who promptly thought, “She’s 10! Ten-year-olds are not promiscuous!”

Powell said the child barely understood what had happened, using phrases like “good touching” and “bad touching” to try to describe what had been done to her before resorting to drawing pictures to show what she had suffered.

“She had no idea what words to even use,” said Powell.

If even a social worker can grant that kind of agency to a child, it’s not much of a stretch to see how others — even foster parents — might see teenage girls as adults.

So FAIR Girls also trains foster parents how to look for the red flags that indicate a girl is being groomed, such as a change in how she dresses and having expensive things she can’t explain. And knowing that trafficked girls are now sold not only on streets but also online, Powell and her colleagues scour sites like Backpage.com, looking at photos of girls with their faces hidden and blurred. Pimps often do that to hide how young the girls are, but the underdeveloped bodies, awkwardly posed in garish lingerie, tend to be a giveaway.

In one instance, they found a girl advertised as “Juicy hot lips”; her body appeared to be that of a prepubescent or barely pubescent girl. They copied her phone number and ran a Google search on it. Bingo — a site used by johns reviewing girls they purchased came up. A couple of the reviews indicated that the girl looked young in person too, though that did not seem to deter the johns.

The FAIR Girls workers reported what they saw to the police, but, they said, given the number of such listings, they don’t always have time to follow up.

Law enforcement is generally savvy about where to find the pimps; they are where the girls are, where runaways congregate, in areas with foster homes and group homes. But when it comes to how authorities treat abused girls, there remains a wide chasm between underage girls who are molested and ones who are seen as child prostitutes — a term no longer used by those who help exploited girls.

While things are changing somewhat in cities like New York and Washington, there’s a still a long way to go, said Rachel Lloyd, the founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS), a New York–based organization focusing on girls and young women who have been trafficked.

Lloyd, a survivor of sex trafficking as a teen in the U.K. and Germany, has been at the forefront of the fight to have minors trafficked into the sex industry recognized as victims.

“Up until 2008, when in New York we passed the first safe harbor law, people didn’t even think of it as a problem. It was just par for the course. If you’re a child or a juvenile who was engaged in commercial sex, then you were arrested and charged,” she said. “Even though in any other case, they would be victims of statutory rape and the adult who bought them would be the criminal.”

“In cases of statutory rape, you don’t have plausible deniability,” said Lloyd. “Saying ‘Oh, I didn’t know how old she was’ isn’t actually a defense.”

She said it took about five years to get the bill passed. She added, “There are around 30 states in the nation that don’t see this as a problem and haven’t caught up their laws to see this as an issue of victimization.”

This is partly because society sees trafficked girls as knowing and complicit, granting them adult qualities. The john is “just a guy doing what guys do,” said Lloyd, who wrote “Girls Like Us,” a memoir of her life as an exploited teen, and helped make a documentary, “Very Young Girls,” about exploited girls.

Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on preventing sex trafficking, said almost all states have laws against child molestation. But, she added, “if you add money to that — if a man goes to a truck stop, has a girl delivered, as long as he paid for her, he would be considered a john,” as opposed to a child molester.

She has focused on combating the trafficking of minors for sex for about a decade. Shared Hope keeps track of bills aimed at fighting sex trafficking of children and produces reports on how states perform in protecting minors and going after johns.

A former lawmaker — she represented Washington’s 3rd Congressional District from 1995 to 1999 — Smith developed the Demanding Justice Project, which puts the focus on johns and demand.

A recent fact sheet produced by Demanding Justice followed 134 cases of men busted for buying sex from minors. Of those, 119 were arrested and 113 were found guilty, with 26 percent of them serving no time and 69 percent of the others’ sentences being suspended.

“What we’re seeing is that as law enforcement gets who that little girl is, they start treating her as victim of a violent crime … They’re going out and arresting the buyers and retrieving the girls,” said Smith.

This is her at her most measured, unlike the time she appeared on Dr. Phil’s TV show in 2008 and suggested that the system make examples of johns, saying, “You hang just a few guys … and the rest will be like the crows that won’t go over the corn when they see a few dead ones hanging.”

“I said that, didn’t I?” she said, laughing. “Well, I meant it.”