This summer, I worked at the Children’s Advocacy Center in Boston alongside an organization called My Life, My Choice, which was devoted to helping sexually exploited teenagers get out of “the life.” During my time there, I learned that over ninety percent of “prostitutes” were recruited when they were between the ages of twelve and fourteen. They were coerced into the profession by sweet-talking pimps who promised them the two most valuable things a young girl from a broken home could want: love and security.
Many of these girls were picked up when they ran away from home, visibly displaying their instability with their bare feet and hunched, defeated postures. When a handsome young man pulled up next to them in a nice car, telling them how pretty they looked, the girls’ heartstrings were so tender that they agreed to go with—and, most importantly, be loved by—this stranger.
Over time, the man would ask his beloved to do some favors for him, explaining that they were opportunities for her to demonstrate her love and commitment to him. When the beatings started, the girls would accept them as just responses to their indecent actions—necessary prices to pay for the continued “love” of their men.
From our perspective (one that we purport to be at least semi-objective), this is not a “good life.” We would not enjoy being in these girls’ positions; in fact, we deem it universally physically and psychologically degrading. But why then do these girls, when they are “rescued” from their pimps, still want to go back?
The movie Very Young Girls (2007), produced by Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS), explains how recovering from sexual exploitation is akin to recovering from an addiction. When a girl feels that she had been loved, no matter how abusive that love was, she will always desire that feeling. So how can one convince a girl that she doesn’t want what she thinks she wants, and that what she wants is out there somewhere in the amorphous cloud of “normal life,” of which she has no conception?
She keeps going back to the known because she feels safe in that familiar situation of understood roles—and can we blame her? To her, this is a “good life,” just as a life of mutual respect and care in our framework is a “good life.” It is possible to assert that she has been brainwashed to believe that the life she is leading is a “good” one—but then the question of what it means to be brainwashed arises.
We all live according to the morals that we deem to be important to sustaining our lives and promoting our version of the “good,” yet how do I know that what I believe is really true (or, at least, true enough for me)? Perhaps I have been educated to believe that the way in which I relate to people is correct, while someone else might see that particular way as entirely immoral.
Anti-Semitism and racism serve as useful examples to elucidate this point. People throughout history have been educated to believe that certain individuals are less valuable based on arbitrary classifications of “otherness.” M.I.A’s controversial music video, Born Free, patently demonstrates the tendency to form distinctions based on involuntary characteristics (her target minority is redheads). We feel that people who subscribe to these tendencies have been “brainwashed,” but perhaps it is more beneficial to recognize their ideas as consequences of education.
In the examples of sexually exploited teenagers and the taught “othering” implicit in discriminatory beliefs, what we perceive to be objectively “good” is called into question. In our own understandings of the world, have we been taught the truth or merely another form of bias?
It is impossible to completely separate ourselves from what we have been taught, since our education (both formal and informal) fundamentally informs our deep, basic aspirations. Thus, since people’s personalities are so deeply molded by experience, all we can do is attempt to bring people into environments in which they may choose to pursue different values. To give a person the option of fostering his or her own sense of self is the greatest means by which we can guide people towards becoming true individuals—not merely products of education.
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