The Name Game

On March 12, 2003, the world held its breath at the recovery of Elizabeth Smart.

Her reunion with her family was celebrated and the media had a frenzy speculating the details of her confinement. As the facts emerged, Elizabeth’s story was received with compassion and widespread empathy. Very few questioned why she attempted to escape “just once,” or why she didn’t scream for help the time she heard someone from a search party call her name.

Psychologists and the general public swarmed to her defense, citing the power of trauma bonds, or Stockholm syndrome, that would keep a girl from running and even enable her to feel affection for her captor. We all understood that her very young age hindered her capacity to reason as an adult, to make the decisions we might have, were we in her situation. Elizabeth Smart was accurately depicted as a victim, as she should have been.

Fourteen year olds all over the country are experiencing similar dynamics to Elizabeth’s confinement. The factors of how they arrived in their captivity are different, but the final situation is horrifically similar. Their captors, the pimps, brainwash them, cut their ties with outside family and friends, rape them repeatedly and use their sexuality at their disposal. Sexual and physical violence is used to reinforce the captor’s power, and the girls’ lives become about survival, left with no will or identity of their own.

One of the problems is that these girls look different than Elizabeth Smart. Most of them are not blonde, most of them don’t come from “respectable,” well-heeled families with camera-friendly faces, and almost all of them have troubled pasts.

There’s a double-standard here, and it starts with our language.

When a girl is taken from her bed in the middle of the night, we rightfully call it kidnapping and we come running to her rescue. When a girl is led by poverty, abuse or neglect into the arms of a manipulative and controlling man who pimps her out every night, we call it “her choice.” 

When an adult man approaches a minor for a sex, we call it statutory rape. When an adult man pays for sex with that same minor, we call it prostitution and we have other words for her as well.

When a 40-year-old coerces a minor to perform a sex act, we label him as a sex offender. We make posters of him, complete a written description of his offense and his photo, and we post them on the corkboards of libraries and schools to warn our community. When that same 40-year-old goes to a strip club and takes a minor back to the champagne room, we say he “has needs” and we might even level criminal charges against the girl. 

While she may dress the part, strapping on stilettos in favor of Ms. Smart's burka, it's all a facade, an extension of one man's attempt to help justify another man's delusion - that the girl with baby fat and adolescent acne standing before him really is a mature, empowered woman excited to fulfill his deviant fantasies. 

We rightfully saw Brian David Mitchell as the responsible and culpable adult in Elizabeth’s nightmare, but for the hundreds of minors who are commercially sexually exploited every night, we still cannot see past the puppet to the puppeteer and real men with names like “Gruesome” and “Dollars” skirt the stigma, the arrests, the jail time, the hospital visits, and the sometimes fatal results of working “in the life.”

We’ve become so accustomed to those clubs and those parts of town, to those girls walking the streets, to those reports of crime, that we’ve become blinded to the heinous truth. As a society, we’ve normalized what we call “teen prostitution” by accepting that it’s just part of our culture. While we won’t let high school girls go on field trips without their parent’s signature, we project a maturity and an expectation of adult reasoning onto girls in the sex industry that's unwarranted.

They should know better, we say, they should run from their pimp if it’s that bad; they should make better choices.

And that’s exactly the point, with victims who’ve been traumatized. 

It’s a matter of choice.

Whether from Salt Lake City, Detroit, or Tampa, fourteen year old girls who are repeatedly raped and forced to use sex for survival have long lost the concept of choice.

Let’s change our language, let’s change our attitudes, and then let’s work to give it back to her.