Rachel Lloyd dropped out of school at the age of 13 and hit the streets, which she found preferable to a home where her mother drank heavily and her stepfather was abusive. A native of Stalbridge, UK, she started nude modeling at 14 and soon skidded into stripping. By 17, she was fully enmeshed in the skin trade and in thrall to her pimp, who repeatedly raped and beat her. She came to rely on alcohol and drugs to drown her pain, even attempted suicide. A scar from a knife slash on her right hand is still visible.

SAVING YOUNG WOMEN
“I had no idea what I was getting into when I started GEMS in 1998,” says Lloyd, now 35, on a sunny afternoon at the Harlem headquarters of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services. “I had an apartment in New York, a computer and thirty dollars.”

With Lloyd as founder and director, GEMS has grown from her idea to become the only organization in New York State specifically designed to save young women – ages 12-21 – who have fallen into commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking.

Named by Ms. Magazine as “One of 50 Women Who Change the World,” given the Susan B. Anthony Award by the National Organization of Women and the Reebok International Human Rights Award by Reebok, Lloyd is about as recognized as someone can be while avoiding celebrity. Perhaps her greatest accolade is the stirring rock ballad “This Is To Mother You,” recorded by Sinead O’Connor and Mary J. Blige, which tells the plight of sexually trafficked girls with a portion of the royalties earmarked for GEMS.

“GEMS focuses on empowerment, education and employment, and the GEMS model has incorporated a lot of the practices of AA and other 12-step programs,” says Lloyd. “The 12-step model has been used all over the world to help millions of people recover, and we’ve found it to be beneficial too, even though we don’t use the 12 steps per se. For example, a valuable tool for the girls is to be aware of HALT – Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired – because they’re susceptible to making poor decisions if they fall into HALT. ‘First Things First’ and ‘Easy Does It’ are important things for the girls to remember too.”

THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY
Get the girls off the streets, give them housing, and get them started on the road to recovery is the basic formula. “Approximately 40% to 50% of the girls we work with have issues with drugs or alcohol,” says Lloyd. “To be on the streets, some of the girls rely on alcohol to loosen them up or to numb themselves out, because they have to go through the dehumanizing process of selling their bodies to strangers and also the dehumanizing manipulation of their pimps or traffickers.”

A 2007 Showtime documentary, “Very Young Girls,” documents the frontline work of the GEMS staff as they unshackle adolescent girls from their pimps and the horrors of New York City’s skin trade. The film uses vérité and intimate interviews with the girls as they discuss being lured onto the streets and the dire events that follow. The film also uses startling footage shot by two brazen pimps who demonstrate a stunningly sadistic glee as they physically and psychologically torment young women.

“Even the girls mentored by GEMS who don’t have a dependence on drugs or alcohol begin a very long recovery process, because of their trauma-based lives,” says Lloyd. “They’ve often been physically and sexually abused in their families of origin or the foster homes where they’ve been raised. After they become the victims of traffickers or pimps, they often receive vicious beatings. So when girls come to GEMS, they begin a lengthy process of learning how to live in the world and not lapse into the self-destructive patterns that have been part of their lives since their earliest memories.”

The documentary follows the GEMS girls teetering on a tenuous tight-wire between the love and support imparted by GEMS and the Svengali-like allure of their pimps.

“Most of the girls have experienced severe trauma in their families of origin or in their foster families, which makes them susceptible to forming codependent, trauma-based relationships with their pimps or traffickers,” says Lloyd. “They look at their pimps or traffickers as their caretakers, and they form bonds with them that are very difficult to break despite the extreme abuse that they’ve endured – it’s like Stockholm Syndrome.”

In GEMS terminology, girls who opt to return to sexual exploitation are considered to be on a “relapse,” the usual word for going back to any addiction. In “Very Young Girls,” Lloyd is shown visiting one of the relapsed clients in a Florida hospital after she had been bludgeoned into disfigurement and left for dead. The scene of the young woman lying in a hospital bed, her face swollen into near unrecognition, confirms that a relapse of a GEMS’ girl has the potential to be as lethal as that of any kind of addict in recovery.

AMERICA’S DIRTY SECRET
GEMS and many other organizations are getting the word out about a new “abolitionist” movement that is growing louder every day. Unfortunately, their collective voice is a mere whisper when contending with the business of trafficking women and children. Trafficking rakes in billions of dollars a year worldwide. It’s even more profitable than the usual addictive substances, because women can be sold hundreds of times, while a drug is used only once. The profits from one trafficked woman alone are estimated to average around $250,000 per year.

A popular perception of child sexual trafficking is that it’s the bane of third world and developing countries. And it is; but beneath the perception lies a nasty, little secret: An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American children are domestically trafficked every year, and the average age of an American child entering commercial sexual exploitation is 13 years old.

A vicious triangle whose three sides are the traffickers, victims, and customers, the sex trade relies on codependency, alcohol, and drugs to padlock children into a life of prostitution. The customers who create the demand are often driven by their own addictions.

“I had been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for eight years when I realized that sexual addiction was a core issue for me that had to be addressed,” says Jim, a happily married father of two children and media executive in New York City. Jim has been sober for 16 years, but only after getting into recovery did he realize that his sexual addiction was jeopardizing his second marriage.

“Sexual addiction recovery has been considerably more difficult than recovery from alcohol and drugs, because alcohol and drugs made me unemployable,” says Jim. “I had to deal with it or lose everything. But I could adequately perform my job while pursuing my sex addiction on the side. It seemed like a hobby until I realized I was going to lose my family.”

As an active sex addict, Jim wasn’t aware that the average age of entry into commercial sexual exploitation in the U.S. was 13 years old.

“When I was in the throes of my addiction, I don’t think that would have affected me,” Jim sighs. “Although I knew about the destructiveness of the cocaine trade in South America and Washington Heights, that knowledge never put a damper on my use of the drug. Now that I’m not caught up in active sexual addiction, though, compassion for the girls is certainly an additional incentive for my recovery.”

In a world that is rife with addiction and other mental health disorders, that glimmer of recovery and compassion keeps Rachel Lloyd and the new abolitionists going in a seemingly insurmountable task.

“The trafficking of girls for sexual exploitation is a ubiquitous problem in our society,” says Lloyd. “Resources to help victims should be made available in all communities, and we need a national movement to make everyone understand: It’s never okay to buy girls.”

Nick Bryant is the author of “The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal” (Trine Day).

In order to protect its young clients GEMS does not publicize its street address. Their website is here. Their phone number is 212-926-8089.