Very Young Girls

The average age at which a girl enters into prostitution in the United States is thirteen.

Chew on that for a moment.

This narrow, yet hard-hitting documentary from David Schisgall and Nina Alvarez about a group of young prostitutes experiencing rehabilitation and therapy at Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS) halfway house in NYC is quite the eye opener. Especially when juxtaposed to the glamorous call girl fantasies of Hollywood films or reality shows like Cathouse.

While not as in-depth as it could be, Very Young Girls does adequately touch on the painful realities these young women face in escaping "The Life" on the street.

Through testimony of the girls (about six principals), their candid interactions during their stay at the center and the advocacy of GEMS founder Rachel Lloyd (a former prostitute herself) we learn the sordid, heartbreaking business at hand.

Lloyd began GEMS out of her own apartment with a few cots and a borrowed computer in 1998. She truly walks the walk. She realizes she cannot help all the girls that need it but finds success and purpose in the few she saves. Frustratingly, many of the girls fall back into the lifestyle and carry an unconditional love for their pimps. Tragic recidivism.

To the letter, each girl has been conned by a much older man into hooking. Whether using brainwashing recruiting tactics, playing father-figure/lover/boyfriend, providing drugs or simply administering physical abuse or threats - the girls long for the attention and protection these monsters provide. Their naiveté, timidity and insecurities - combined with the fact that most of them are from broken, abusive homes to begin with - make them easy targets for emotional manipulation.

In an aside of the film, the Brooklyn D.A. offers classes to "johns" who have been picked up soliciting. Attendance will reduce or dismiss their sentence. As a female officer begins relating the grim facts of these young girls' lives and the destruction it causes, one guy raises his hand. She calls on him. The jerkoff asks, amidst the sobering details, when the first break for the class will be, to the hearty laughter of the other attendees.

Men can be awful people.

The other tragedy in all of this is our society's hypocritical and outdated Puritanism which (like the drug laws) continually push this problem underground and into the shadows.

The legalization and regulation of the sex industry and the unionization of its workers would nearly eradicate this problem overnight.

We are putting minors in jail on prostitution charges who are not of legal age to consent to sex. That's a glaring ethical and political contradiction right there.

The Culture War. The War on Drugs. The War on Terror.

The War on Sanity.

Like most of society's ills, it can be traced to poverty and lack of education.

We need to stop waging wars abroad and focus on cleaning up our own backyard.

Legalizing victimless crimes of choice would be a nice start.

On a positive note, the home movie footage of two pimp brothers used in the film (they believed it would catapult them to reality teevee stardom) actually resulted in their incarceration for ten years.

Sometimes justice tastes so ironically sweet.