Big Pimpin

A young 13 year old foster care runaway, steps out of port authority. Lost in a big city with nowhere to turn, a man pulls up in a beige Cadillac and she gets in. He’s a pimp. He takes her to a prostitution house and for the next four years the girl is sexually exploited. The average age of prostitution the in United States is 13. There is reason why the title of the documentary film about the sexual exploitation of girls in New York City is “Very Young Girls”. These girls are barely entering puberty, yet they are being picked up by thirty-year old pimps who promise them love and a family. After watching this film today, it made me question how the glamorization of the pimp/ho culture by the Hip Hop industry influences these girls.

When hearing the young foster care runaway tell her story, one might ask what was running through her head as she got in that Cadillac? In her interview she describes her thoughts upon first seeing the car. She states that she thought the man must be involved in the Hip Hop industry because of his nice car and the fact that he was a pimp. When he said that he was a pimp she did not realize that he meant an actual pimp, she envisioned they were stars like Lil’ Jon and Lil’ Wayne. There is a noticeable effect of the Hip Hop culture on these young girls who leave school before they can be fully educated. They believe they deserve to be hoes, which is understandable when hip hop artists like Snoop Dogg sings, “Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks...” They have black women shaking their butts in their video, like the young girls described themselves doing night after night on the street corner. These videos teach young girls that the only way to get their ‘pimp’ is to sell their sexuality. The worst part of the situation is that in order to combat this problem in the city the pimps are not being arrested, but the young girls.

Luckily there is GEMS, a program that helps these young girls get off the streets and finish their education. A lot of times people focus on the human trafficking problems outside the US in Thailand and the Philippines and forget there are similar problems in the right in their own areas. GEMS is located in New York City and here is their website with a trailer for the documentary:

http://www.gems-girls.org/girlsarenotforsale.html