NEWSBYRACHEL LLOYD

After long week at work, one of my favorite guilty pleasures is Fashion Police on E! with Joan Rivers. You either love Joan Rivers or hate her, and I'm definitely in the fan camp. She's a fearless woman who speaks her mind, isn't scared of offending people and is incredibly self-deprecating -- all qualities I appreciate. She's also frequently side-splittingly funny and while her whole persona, and the concept of Fashion Police is obviously based on criticizing celebrities, mostly women, to the point of mean-spiritedness, it is often very very funny. Like I said, it's a truly guilty pleasure with the emphasis on guilty. But... while I'm sure that most celebrities think Fashion Police crosses all kinds of lines every week, for me they've now crossed the line from funny to incredibly offensive and damaging.

Fashion Police has a recurring segment called "Starlet or Streetwalker," which is exactly what it sounds like. The panel, made up of George Kotsiopoulos, Kelly Osbourne and Giuliana Rancic, are shown pictures of women with their faces covered. Based on the outfit, the panel then has to vote if the woman in the photo is a starlet or a streetwalker. If the woman turns out to be a celebrity, her face is shown, if its a woman in the sex industry, her face remains blacked out. The panel, the studio audience and I'm sure the viewers watching at home laugh at these women and their 'tacky, trashy clothing.' The first time I saw the segment, it took me a minute to realize that the women whose faces were covered up were actually real women in the sex industry. I then watched with growing discomfort as I realized that these women, poor women, desperate women, drug-addicted women, women under the control of a pimp, women who are victims of violence and exploitation, were being used to highlight wealthy celebrities' poor fashion choices. Haha.

Rachel Lloyd is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Sara Kruzan was 16 years old when she was charged with killing her 31-year-old pimp, a man who had been grooming her since she was 11 years old and trafficking her since she was 13. Abused as a small child and living with a drug-addicted mother, Sara was the ideal victim for the lure of a predator. While other girls her age were in junior high school, Sara was experiencing the attention and ‘affections’ of a pimp who began to exercise control over her young mind. When other girls were entering high school, Sara was already being sold to adults, forced to turn over her money to her ‘daddy’ and beaten if she resisted.  In fact, Sara’s life up until her arrest was a litany of abuse and trauma, absent and predatory adults, failed systems and a total dearth of support and services.  It is clear that Sara never had the opportunity to be just a young girl, and yet mentally and emotionally she was still very much a child. The court could have decided to take all these mitigating factors into consideration when sentencing her. Instead Sara was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

When I first learned about Sara’s case, I was horrified. It was such a clear and egregious abuse of the criminal justice system, and my heart went out to this woman, just a few years younger than me who had grown up in jail. It was hard for me not to feel a sense of survivor’s guilt and recognize that it could have easily been me waking up every day in prison. I remember vividly the night I decided to kill my pimp. It was 1994, the same year Sara was convicted. I was 19 years old, angry and desperate, trapped and hopeless. I knew I would probably go to jail but I didn’t care. At the time I thought I planned it carefully. In retrospect there was no real plan in place, other than waiting until he was asleep to shoot him, as it would be the only time that I would be able to do it safely. I knew a guy who knew a guy who would sell me the gun. I hid some of my earnings from my pimp and took the money to the guy. Fate intervened and I was unable to purchase the gun that night. I lost my momentum, and while I thought about it many more times, I was never able to work up the nerve again to do it. There is, however, little doubt in my mind that had the gun been in my hand that night, I would have pulled the trigger.

That was 16 years ago, and it is hard today to not only picture how different my life could have been, but to reconcile that angry, traumatized girl with the woman that I am now. Since then, I’ve been able to contribute to society in ways that no-one who met the teenage me could have imagined. I’ve had a chance to travel, get my GED, go to graduate school, fall in love, find peace and most importantly, use my own experiences to provide services to thousands of trafficked and commercially sexually exploited girls.

Not only have I changed immeasurably in the last 16 years, but so has our collective understanding of the commercial sex industry. When both Sara and I were being pimped and exploited, we weren’t considered trafficked youth, just “prostitutes”. It wouldn’t be until 2000 when the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was first passed as federal law that a child under the age of 18 who was in the commercial sex industry could be considered a victim of a severe form of trafficking. Taking into account the vast amount of research and literature on child and adolescent development, the law also ensured that there was no need to prove ‘fraud, force or coercion’ if the victim was under the age of 18. The fact that the victim was a child is enough. In 1994, there were few outreach or intervention programs specifically designed to serve commercially sexually exploited and trafficked girls -- programs that might have prevented girls like me or Sara from being recruited by pimps in the first place. And there was little understanding of the trauma bonds that trafficked girls have with their pimps and no empathy for victims. The most common question I would hear is "Why didn’t you just walk away and get help?"  It was clearly implied in that question that I was to blame for my victimization. Sixteen years later, we are beginning to understand the close connection between the power and control used by batterers and by traffickers, and we are learning that trafficking victims experience the same types of learned helplessness, Stockholm Syndrome, and inability to escape that many domestic violence victims do. For trafficking victims, we know that these dynamics are only strengthened by the age of the victims, the histories of abuse that the vast majority of exploited children share and the continued lack of services and support available to these youth.

Rachel Lloyd is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Dear Jim,

We met about 18 months ago via video-conference and at that time I shared with you a story of an 11 year old girl that I was working with. I'm not sure if you remember her, but I'd like to share this story with you again.

"Bethany" had been in foster care since she was 2 years old and had bounced from foster home to foster home, until at 11 she was introduced to a friend of her 14 year old sister. This friend was a 32 year old man who lured her in with promises of a stable home and love, everything she'd been craving her whole short life. He took Bethany from New York down to a hotel in DC, bought her some ‘sexy' clothes, and took pictures of her and then posted those pictures on your site, Craigslist. Bethany didn't really think there was anything unusual about this, after all her 14 and 16 year old sisters were both being sold on Craigslist too.

For nine months, almost till she turned 12 years old, Bethany's pictures were posted on Craigslist. Sometimes she was "NEW IN TOWN" when her pimp/trafficker would bring her to cities up and down the East Coast, posting her pictures in different regions. Sometimes she was "HOT N SEXXY FOR U" with her price listed as 150 roses. Night after night, adult men clicked on her ads, dialed a number and ordered her as easily as they would've ordered a pizza. Night after night, adult men came to the hotel room she was being kept in and had sex with her, or rather raped her, as at 11 years old she was too young to consent. Night after night, her pimp collected the money that he made from her and if it wasn't enough he beat or whipped her, badly enough that she has permanent scars.

Rachel Lloyd is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Last summer two iconic musicians Sinead O'Connor and Mary J. Blige came together for the recording of "This is To Mother You" a benefit song for GEMS to bring awareness to the issues of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of American girls.  Although the song was written and released by Sinead several years ago, the words are so relevant today and to the work that we do at GEMS.

What made the project even more significant was having a survivor voice and former GEMS member, Martha B. included on the track.  Martha now 21, came to GEMS at 14 and has been impacted by all of our programs including leadership training, youth outreach, living at our residence, and even working at the GEMS office. Martha has always had an amazing voice and aspirations of singing professionally so when this opportunity presented itself, it was serendipitous!

It was really an honor to have artists of Sinead and Mary's caliber taking a stand and joining GEMS in our effort to promote girls empowerment and education as critical tools in the fight against the commercial sexual exploitation of children.  Both Sinead and Mary are artists who use their voice and celebrity to advocate against injustices impacting women and children.

Rachel Lloyd is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

There's been lots of coverage in the last 24 hours on the Twitter 'feud' between Demi Moore and Kim Kardashian. Yet the glaring omission from all the articles, blogs and commentary is any real analysis of Demi's point - that we glamorize and glorify pimp culture, use terminology that seems to legitimize the practice, and in doing so ignore the fact that pimps are modern-day slave-owners.

I'm the founder and Executive Director of GEMS, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, the nation's largest service provider to girls and young women who've been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked. Every day, I witness the impact that pimps have on the lives of girls in this country. Girls are left with physical and psychological scars from the brutal tactics of adult men who prey upon some of the most vulnerable children in our society and then sell them for profit over and over again.

Demi, and her husband Ashton, have met some of the girls GEMS serves, heard their horrific stories about being under pimp control and have taken action. They launched the DNA Foundation with the goal of ending child sex trafficking both in the US and abroad and recently donated a $250,000 Pepsi Refresh grant to support GEMS services to survivors of domestic trafficking. Both Demi and Ashton have been raising the alarm about the epidemic of child sex trafficking that's happening right here in the US to American girls for over a year now, and yet it's an exchange with Kim Kardashian that has garnered the most attention.