Girls Like Us Quotes

“Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems.
For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I'm overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.
I cry for hour at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal?”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“Sing me a pretty love song as I start to cry
Tell me you love me as you wipe the blood from my eye
Tell me why the only one who can wipe away my tears
Is the only one who's the source of all my fears”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“..you may not be able to choose your family or origin but you can choose your family of creation.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“Most women have been in a relationship that they know is no good for them. Your friends and family know it is no good for you, but you’re too besotted to see straight. It may take a few attempts, some late-night crying sessions, some serious talking to from your girlfriends, but eventually you’re able to leave and look back with a mixture of regret and disbelief that you put up with that person for so long. The relationship may not have been physically abusive, but bad relationships can fall anywhere on a continuum, from the guy who doesn’t call when he says he will to the guy who has a wandering eye to the guy who cheats with your college roommate.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Girls weren’t drug addicted, they were love addicted, and that, I’ll learn, is far harder to treat.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Over time I learned that there were a lot of people who would judge you, blame you, and try to make you feel lesser, no matter what you did; that a degree, a good suit, and a career wouldn't always insulate you from scorn.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls' lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“Regardless of the circumstances, what makes the most difference in whether a girl leaves or not when that door opens up is if she believes that she has options, resources, somewhere to go, and the support she’ll need once she’s out. Without that glimmer of hope, whether it comes in the form of family, a program like GEMS, or a church community like the one that helped me, it’s unlikely that she’ll leave. And then the door will close just as quickly as it opened, leaving her feeling trapped once more. and this time even more convinced that this is the life that she’s destined to lead.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“His experiences of growing up in violence, poverty, and neglect could be the story of one of the girls—except that he has become the perpetrator, not the victim.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Suddenly, Jeffrey Winter, a Republican lobbyist whom I neither particularly know nor particularly like, grabs both my arms in a vise grip. Before I’ve even had time to register this invasion of personal space, he stage-whispers, “Long way from the street, eh?”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Not only do pimps all seem to use the same tactics, but they also all seem to have graduated from the same mind-control training camp as cult leaders, hostage takers, terrorists, and dictators of small countries.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“it’s critical to note that anyone who makes money off the commercial sexual exploitation of someone else is pimping them, be they a parent, a pornographer, or a member of an organized crime syndicate”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“As Andrea Dworkin once said, “Incest is boot camp for prostitution.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“It's hard to explain to Tiana that her feelings about this aren't indicative of what a great guy her 'daddy' is but rather an indictment against how awful all the adults in her life have been...If you haven't had proper love and care, then a substitute will feel like the real thing, because you've got nothing to compare it to. For Tiana, whose entire fifteen years on the earth have been filled with physical violence, neglect, and horrific abuse, this analogy doesn't really make sense. Her 'daddy' is the first person who's shown her any type of kindness, who's modeled what a 'real' family looks like- even though after dinner he takes her and the other girls out and sells them on the street.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“We ask questions such as, "Why doesn't she just leave?" and "WHy would someone want to turn all their money over to a pimp?" instead of asking, "What is the impact of poverty on these children?" "How do race and class factor into the equation?" "Beyond their family backgrounds, what is the story of their neighborhoods, their communities, their cities?”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“It's often not until you explain that this phenomenon is what is commonly called "teen prostitution" that recognition dawns. "Oh, that...but that's different. Teen prostitutes choose to be doing that; aren't they normally on drugs or something?" In under three minutes, they've gone from sympathy to confusion to blame. Not because the issue is any different, not because the violence isn't as real, not because the girls aren't as scared, but simply because borders haven't been crossed, simply because the victims are American.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us

“despite the fact that I’ve never finished high school myself, neither he nor I had a clue what I’d end up doing. I couldn’t type, I’d never filed, and I had horrific computer skills. In the face of my earnestness, he reluctantly pawned me off onto Dr. Hall, who within a couple of weeks was giving me Reviving Ophelia and a stack of other books about adolescent girls to read.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“While it calms her down a little, I know that I’m not the one she wants absolution from. She wants to hear it from her mother, her big brother, her friends, her boyfriend, because she’s still not convinced that getting raped by an adult when she was fifteen wasn’t her fault and that getting recruited by a pimp from a group home at sixteen wasn’t her fault.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Examples of pimp references permeate every aspect of popular culture. Some argue that the meaning of the word has changed and now reflects something positive.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Psychologist Dee Graham identified four factors that need to be present for Stockholm syndrome to occur: a perceived threat to survival and the belief that one’s captor is willing to act on that threat, the captive’s perception of small kindnesses from the captor within a context of terror, isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor, and a perceived inability to escape.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself

“Canadian commission found that women in the sex industry are 40 times more likely to be murdered than other women. Another study put the estimate as high as 130 times more likely to be murdered.”
― Rachel Lloyd, Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself