Heather Berg seeks to clarify some points around “risky behaviors”, “sexually acting out” and “girls vs. young adults” in Tom Matlack’s interview with the directors of Germaine Lawrence residential treatment facility for adolescent girls.
Tom Matlack’s original interview was with David Hirshberg, executive director of Germaine Lawrence; Amy Corbett, clinical director of the ACT Group Home and Nikki Valila, program director of the ACT Group Home. The interview “A Place of Hope” can be found here.
First, I want to make clear that I appreciate the (clearly well-intentioned and I’m sure often helpful) efforts of those interviewed in “A Place of Hope.” The points I take issue with in the piece are systemic, not individual. The interview falls short in many of the places most crucial to the young women the advocates speak of, and it does so in ways that echo larger trends in approaches to young women who engage in commercial sex.
Many of the issues I’d like to address are linguistic; language matters, particularly when you’ve undertaken the task of telling someone else’s story. Choices to use the terms “girl,” “risky behavior” (which assigns blame for a given outcome on a “risk taker” rather than a perpetrator), “sexually acting out” (a phrase that’s almost never used in reference to males), and “exploiting themselves” (how this is syntactically possible isn’t totally clear to me) have significant effects on how we approach human stories.
“A Place of Hope’s” tagline defines Hirschberg, Corbett, and Valila’s work as “serv[ing] girls who engage in risky behaviors.” With one exception (Corbett referring to a client whose treatment has been successful as a “young woman”), both Tom Matlack and his interviewees use the term “girls” to refer to Germaine Lawrence’s clients, who are between the ages of 13 and 18. Important power dynamics are at play here, and this wording choice speaks to a general tendency to use the term “young women” when referring to adolescent females engaged in approved behaviors, and the term “girls” to those that aren’t. The wording choice is particularly interesting when we consider that young women become involved with Germaine Lawrence after supporting and fending for themselves, often in contexts most adults will never face. How are the approaches that we as readers and the interviewees as service workers take to these young women colored by such wording choices? Might positioning Germaine Lawerence’s clients as childlike allow us a level of condescension that would be inappropriate when dealing with “young adults”?
Might that condescension encourage us to view Germaine Lawerence’s clients’ choices from a deficiency perspective, identifying them as “risky behaviors” and “self-exploitation” rather than survival mechanisms? Hirshberg notes that many clients became involved in commercial sex after having run away from abusive homes.[1] What could be gained by understanding their entry into commercial sex as a calculated survival measure among a set of limited options rather than one-dimensional exploitation by individuals (or a childish desire for “really nice stuff”)? If, “a lot of the girls come in and don’t actually acknowledge that they’ve been exploited,” what could be gained by asking, “how do they define their situation?”
Many feminists interested in sex work “advocate taking women’s agency seriously precisely in order to understand how power works.”[2] Doing so in this case would shed light on a number of issues that are absent in “A Place of Hope.” Taking Germaine Lawrence’s clients’ agency seriously would turn us away from easy blame of a few predatory men and force us to ask much broader questions about our own complacency within a system that forces prostitution into the shadows, ensuring that exploitation will occur; radically limits possibility such that entry into dangerous sectors of the sex industry presents itself as a more attractive option than being involved with a broken social service and foster system; and is organized around extreme gender, sexual, class, and racial inequality that forces many people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t in order to survive.
The point at which a celebration of good manhood (and womanhood in this case) becomes one of paternalism is one we should be exceptionally wary of. It’s admirable that Germaine Lawrence seeks to “empower” young women, but what might it mean for us to work towards communities, legal structures, and linguistic choices that don’t deny them power in the first place?
[1] It’s worth noting that young men, particularly those who identify as GBTQ, represent a significant portion of this population and also enter into commercial sex at disproportionate rates.
[2] Clare Hemmings. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. (Duram: Duke University Press, 2011), 206.
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Heather Berg is a PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spends her days on the beach reading about porn and political theory.
It seems to me that the folks at ACT subscribe to the commonplace notion (among rescue industry workers, at any rate), that females (to avoid the girl-woman debate) must be taught to first accept their essential victimization in order to become empowered. Taught with an iron hand, however wrapped in velvet it might be. This is a ridiculous concept, if you think about it. It seems to have crept into feminist thinking via Marxism but, unlike that philosophy, doesn’t see the construction of democratic and collective organizations of struggle as a response to said victimization. ACT seems to be operating… Read more »
Laura, great point regarding the problematic power dynamics embedded in a monetized treatment system! I would be very curious to learn how young women involved in the program view the financial/ power exchange with the center in comparison to that with clients. I wonder if the same affective strategies they employ in sex exchange come in handy.
My work’s looked in detail into how a Rescue Industry fabricates victims that need saving, particularly girls from selling sex. I noted in the original Place of Hope article how there was a veneer of ‘something new’, an alternative vision, but just below the surface things proceed as usual. What is missing from these rescuers’ ideas is any kind of reflecting about themselves and their assumptions that they know what is good and bad, who is making mistakes and who not. As for continuing the centricity of money by giving it out if people behave ‘well’, I feel very uneasy,… Read more »
Heather thanks for the close read and in general I can agree. I did not write the headline so can’t comment on that either way. I did not try to give the impression, nor frankly do the folks at GL, that their clients are anything but victims. On the use of “girl” I actually think that is appropriate. Many of them are just that, whether they were trapped in sex work or in a junior high somewhere. I suppose we could call them young women but I actually don’t think it much matters. And the idea that they are so… Read more »
Thank you for your comments, Tom. The point I was trying to make was precisely that GL clients ARE more than victims, and that failing to approach them as individuals whose identities are complex is a barrier both to service provision and full understanding of the issue of youth prostitution. Approaching GL clients as active survivors doesn’t erase the fact that they have been victimized. Instead, it makes space for them to tell their own stories and contribute to discussions about what policy and service approaches would serve them best. It also allows for a respect for their resilience that’s… Read more »