Girls like us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale: A Memoir - Essay Example

For instance, Lloyd narrates that victims of commercial sexual exploitation are likely to suffer both physical and emotional abuse, psychological manipulation, and sexual assault, at the hands of their pimps because they do not have choices, options, or alternatives. Physical abuse is often in terms of beatings (Lloyd 7), and threats that the pimps use to keep their victims on the streets; the pimps lure their victims with brainwashing techniques such as love, affection and the promise of a family.

Victims of commercial sexual exploitation are also more likely to suffer double victimization, both from their pimps and from society, which accuses them of prostitution rather than pointing the accusing finger at the pimps who exploit them. Drugs and violence in the commercial sex industry are also high risk factors that the victims of this trade are predisposed to; the pimps introduce the victims to drugs and violence on the streets, and the entire experience has a profound psychological drain on them.

Q2 The victims of commercial sexual exploitation do not enjoy the luxury of choice because their options and alternatives are highly limited given the nature of their complex situation of dependence, domination, and psychological control; in this case, the girls who end up victims of commercial sexual exploitation are victims of social problems such as abuse, poverty, racism, and depravity. According to Paul Farmer’s concept of structural violence, social processes and forces often conspire to constrain individual’s social upwards mobility in society by continuously depraving them opportunities; in this respect, structural violence befalls those that are disadvantaged by social structure and organization.

Lloyd narrates how her upbringing was full of discord, with a poor mother who later sank into depression and alcoholism, and an abusive male figure who she barely could ascertain if he was indeed her father. She fed off her friends and petty crimes, and longed to have a loving, caring adult figure, a vulnerability that set her up for manipulation and recruitment into sex trade; her disadvantaged life, and that of other girls in her position puts them at risk of exploitation. To make the matters worse, society’s attitudes and ignorance further victimize the victims of commercial sexual exploitation by accusing them for prostitution without understanding their complexity of choice, or rather than trying to help them out of those situations.

Lloyd shows that girls like her easily fall victims of the psychological manipulation and control techniques of pimps because they have no choice of where to go and what to do due to their disadvantaged social state. Q3 Slavery, exploitation, and violence, as manifested through ‘prostitution’ have progressively become pervasive phenomenon in the media, hip-hop and popular culture’s embrace, and portrayal of being a ‘pimp’ as a fashionable thing. Lloyd demonstrates this fact by pointing out that pimps have been glorified in popular culture and being one is something to boast about as rappers do in their songs, yet it actually entails making money off the commercial sexual exploitation of others.

She further points out that girls tend to grow up in a circle of violence and how domestic violence has been normalized in society by highlighting Chris Brown’s assault of Rihanna, and how she was initially vilified for deserving the attack; some celebrities even tried to