FIVE

I THOUGHT HE WOULD TAKE CARE OF ME

I never had anyone I could trust. I never had anyone who said they’d be there for me. Then he told me that no matter what, he’d take care of me. I believed him. I gave him my heart.

—VALERIE VELEZ

“Well, I got a surprise for you.” Denise is in my office, and she wears a look of mischievous joy. I wonder if she’s found out that she’s been accepted into the MSW program.

“Have you heard from UCLA?” I ask.

“Nope.” She giggles.

“What is it?”

“I think I might be pregnant. I don’t know for sure. I gotta go see a doctor. My home test came out positive.”

I’m anxious that this is going to be a challenge, to say the least. But for just one minute, I forget my misgivings about Denise juggling graduate school and motherhood. The possibility of a child is her hope. Her dream. It’s a flesh-and-blood statement that her life has truly changed.

“And if I’m pregnant, I’m gonna be the best damn mother I can be. I’ve been thinkin’ so much about my own mother.”

I look at Denise carefully. I can’t stop thinking about what she’s already shared with me and how she, along with women like her, have looked for help to deal with the trauma they continue to endure. They didn’t think of counseling or therapy; nothing like that was readily available to them. Instead, each woman’s response was the most natural one in the world: they wanted to find someone—anyone—to protect them from further trauma. And more often than not, this led to the inevitable conclusion that men had the strength and the resources—a man would protect them. This is what so many women had been told and had come to believe: that they couldn’t really protect themselves, that they needed a man to take care of them. I kept hearing the same stories over and over from the women who were part of my work. This was a message they’d received as girls: men weren’t just a source of financial support; men would stand up to threats, they’d protect their woman from danger and from pain, whether it came from the homes they grew up in or the community that surrounded them. From the time they were young, even before they were adolescents, girls believed that their personal safety could be found in relationships with men. “First it was my daddy, but pretty soon I learned that wasn’t true. So, then I told myself, I’d belong to someone and he’d take care of me,” Blanca Ortega, who been involved in gang life, remembered.

Blanca wasn’t alone in that conviction. Many others were convinced that a man would stand up for his woman, he wouldn’t let any outsider abuse her. If someone did—if a woman was attacked—it would be dealt with; street justice was the mechanism men used. Ella Jones, who’d been incarcerated ten years for gang-related crimes, explained it all to me. “I was in Athens Park, sitting with my babies, and two homies grabbed me—took my purse, my rings, my jewelry. Scared the shit out of the kids. I couldn’t believe it. I told my boyfriend what happened when he came over the next morning. By the time the sun went down, those two boys had been tuned up. They weren’t gonna be walking for a few days.” Ella later went on to explain that it didn’t matter that her boyfriend constantly cheated on her. He was there when she needed him.

I kept hearing these stories. I even experienced the promise of some “protection” myself. When I told two gang members I’d known for several years that I’d once been involved in an abusive relationship, they both demanded I share the man’s whereabouts. “We’re gonna mess him up,” one told me. “We’d never let anyone hurt you.” While I quickly told them that I didn’t know where the man was now, I momentarily experienced that feeling of care, however violent its direction. It also frightened me. But my response was irrelevant. What was critical to understand, and I did, was that all of this made women feel safe, that there was someone who was going to watch out for them, take care of what scared them.

Still, this protection comes with a price. For many women, violence and gang involvement make up part of that price.

This is true for Denise. “What happened after your mom kicked you out?” I ask, reassuring her she doesn’t have to talk about it if this isn’t a good time. She starts shaking her head, “Nooooooo,” drawing the word out like a blues singer. “I want to talk about it. I need to talk about it.” After her mom’s rejection, Denise was homeless—another part of many women’s experience that remains unacknowledged, even today. She’d stay in abandoned apartment buildings or go to the house of a man she knew and “he’d look out for me. I trusted that man to take care of me. I needed to feel safe and I knew he’d be there. He wound up being the one who led me to the gang. He was like, ‘You want to be from the hood?’ and I was like, ‘Hell, yeah.’ That’s how it happened.”

It was a rough initiation; Denise had to choose between sex—which meant “I would have to allow anyone who wanted it to actually fuck me and I didn’t want that”—and taking a beating. Without hesitation, she chose the beating. “I drank some 40s. They only punched me a couple of times and then it was over.”

Here, Denise’s story differs from many accounts of female initiation into gang life. In avoiding any sort of group sexual assault, Denise was lucky. Most women are not as fortunate. They’re already traumatized, and many feel forced to endure a sexual initiation. On top of that, as the journalist Gini Sikes first recounted over twenty years ago in her book 8 Ball Chicks, one of the biggest problems for gang-involved girls is their unwillingness to report rape, especially group rape—they don’t even want to see it as a crime.¹ If anyone actually convinces them it is a crime, they still don’t want to report a sexual assault because that might be viewed as snitching. For Denise, after avoiding sexual attack and humiliation, her initiation was a minor problem to endure. After that, she began “putting in work” for the gang, whatever illegal activities they might ask her to be involved in, and ended up getting arrested. “That was when I really felt like I was in the hood. I was really a homegirl—’China.’ I’ll never forget it.” This is Denise’s identity, her roots. She will never let that go.

Understanding the connection between trauma, gang membership, and incarceration is tricky. For the women I knew, their trauma led to their turning to men for protection, which ended up as a precursor to gang involvement. Gang research maintains that there is no single pathway into the hood—it results from a combination of multiple risk factors and the absence of any protective factors. These risk factors diverge in one area: when studies take gender into account. Gang-involved young women are survivors of physical and sexual abuse at a much higher rate than young men.² In their research, Karen Joe and Meda Chesney-Lind have found that 75 percent of the female gang members they interviewed experienced physical abuse, and 62 percent reported that they’d experienced sexual abuse.³ For girls, early trauma is a major risk factor—perhaps the major risk factor—for gang membership and involvement.

This wasn’t just an idea rolling around in my head. Beginning with the staff at the Homegirl Café and branching out from there, since 2008, I’d interviewed eighty women who’d been gang involved, had engaged in criminal activity and ultimately had been incarcerated. I never planned to conduct that many interviews; it wasn’t a formal study. But the women I spent hours with at Homegirl kept telling me about someone else they thought I had to talk to. There was always a new name, a new story and a homegirl urging me, “You gotta talk to her, Little Mama.” It was like some gigantic chain letter that I couldn’t resist. I kept seeing how formerly incarcerated women were strong and resilient in the face of so many obstacles. The portrayal of these women as victims was a lie. I’d never understood this. On top of that, I’d never really grasped how many formerly incarcerated women lived in the communities I worked in, and I’d rarely spent time with them. Driven to learn as much as I could, I felt overwhelmed as they shared their stories. I got to know these women over long time periods, interviewing them and spending time with many of them from 2008 onward. They became part of my life, part of my chosen family, and I wanted to honor their pain and their resilience.

Probably one of the most stunning “findings” that emerged from this study that wasn’t a study was that, with a few exceptions, almost all eighty women had experienced sexual abuse along with physical abuse and related trauma in their childhood. Only seven women had escaped molestation, telling me that while they’d witnessed and even experienced violence, they’d never been sexually abused. One woman, Adela, had been free of any childhood abuse but had witnessed her father abusing her mother over time and had felt responsible for shielding her younger siblings from the violence. Still, she was grateful, telling me, “For all the homegirls I’ve known, I’m the only one who wasn’t beaten or raped when she was growing up.” Adela had other wounds from violence and pain in adulthood. But, in the end, she was one of a small group of outliers in a group of women who’d been sexually traumatized from their childhoods onward.

Whatever their experience, once girls sought protection from the boys and men who ultimately led them into gang life, they were pretty much viewed in terms of their sexuality; all roles assigned to them smacked of sexual objectification. Gang terminology attested to that: the girls were baby mamas or whores; they were bitches or hood rats. There were exceptions—girls who were willing to be violent and women claiming to have moved high up the gang food chain. Los Angeles magazine had profiled Arlene Rodriguez, who was considered, “the queen of Florencia” and lived a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde life as a real estate agent and shot caller for Florencia 13.⁴ But such women were few and far between. Instead, virtually all of the homegirls were desperate to escape the trauma of their homes, their feelings of aloneness and fear. They deeply believed a man would take care of them, and if that man was part of a gang, they would have even more protection. So, despite the sexual assault associated with initiation and their resulting objectification, most of the girls and women I talked with believed that their man and his gang provided a safe haven—including Denise, who took to gangbanging with particular fervor. “I had a boyfriend and I had the hood,” she says. “I was really off the chain—no one could talk to me.”

Denise is clear: no matter what anyone said or how they tried to intervene, the hood was everything to her. Even now, she still feels an attachment to the gang, telling me, “I can’t ever leave it behind. When I think about that period of my life, now—at this age—I remember my hood with love. They’ve got my loyalty. Forever. You know what I mean?”

I’d like to tell her I know exactly what she means. I can’t. I don’t feel anything close to the deep ties of loyalty Denise describes. There is no specific group I feel connected to. The number of people I can’t leave behind is small: my husband, my daughter, my brothers, and a handful of friends—my chosen family. There is no hood in my life. But there was never any molestation or trauma either.

Denise believes the hood was there for her and will always be. She explains to me that her past is something an outsider just can’t understand—she felt safe when she was with her man and other gang members. She doesn’t say a lot about women; there’s no sense of the role they played in hood life. Men were the ones who shielded her from danger. What matters to Denise is how the hood’s code of respect and the consequences for disrespect helped to protect her from outside harm. Still, the protection she sought in the hood and the relationships she encountered with men as a result were much more complicated.

For as long as Denise could remember, men were attracted to her, and once in the hood, she jumped right into a series of relationships. Sitting in my office, talking with me, Denise’s lively attractiveness is in full flower. I’m certain she was beautiful as a young woman, an object of desire. Yet from the beginning, Denise’s encounters with men invariably involved abuse as well as sex. In the hood, love and violence were intertwined, and Denise accepted that abuse was just a side effect of being involved with a man; her trauma had laid the foundation for that belief. “It is what it is,” Denise tells me. But that facade of cynical detachment changes when Denise describes how she found herself in love for the first time.

“Eric was different,” Denise says, sighing. “He’d been in the pen. He’d been involved in some serious crimes in the past—I knew he was violent. But I felt safe with him—so, so safe. It was crazy, right?” From the beginning, Denise was attracted to Eric’s sensitivity, how he was able to tune in to her feelings and understand what she was going through. Yet while the attraction grew, she was failing to recognize the control Eric subtly exerted. She recalls, “I didn’t realize, he was isolating me from everyone.” This isolation is a hallmark of an abusive relationship and is one of the key signs that a woman may be in danger.⁵ Denise knew nothing about the warning signs and danger assessment that Rachel Snyder later detailed so powerfully in No Visible Bruises; all she knew was that she was deeply in love for the first time in her life.⁶ She slowly pulled away from the hood and stopped seeing her friends. She worked at entry-level jobs for low wages while Eric started up a business as a tattoo artist. “I wanted to have a normal life, with a boyfriend, work hard, have fun, the two of us together, but Eric . . .” Denise’s voice trails off for a moment, then she continues. “He was so crazy. He wanted to control me. He started beating me up. I was part of the LA County probation system when I was a teenager. I was never off probation—until I met Eric. I was nineteen and free for the first time. So . . . instead of probation, I got into an abusive relationship.”

Denise was with Eric for five years. “It was a chunk of time that I was away from the system. And then after the relationship with Eric was over, I went back to the system. It’s like I had to have someone or something abusing me.”

Her words are echoed in the stories told by many others. Formerly incarcerated women all too often experience abuse that is both violent and humiliating. They enter into relationships listening to men who reassure them that, whatever happens, they’ll be protected. “Eric kept telling me he’d take care of me,” Denise recalled. “When he started abusing me, I couldn’t believe it.” She was like so many others, believing in the promises of men who offered them safety and a place to belong. These women ultimately feel betrayed and ashamed because they are battered or assaulted by someone they believe they love.⁷ When family or friends question what’s going on in their relationships, women hide the truth and make excuses, telling themselves they’ve got no choice. If they have children, they’re terrified the child welfare system will step in and take their babies away. On top of that, Black women and women of color are caught between their humiliation and their mistrust of the criminal justice system, which for decades has responded with harsh treatment and the brutalization of their men and their communities. This all results in the under-reporting of domestic abuse and violence. In a reversal of the safety they sought from men, now-traumatized women have to protect their men, their families. And they’re not going to say a word against them.

Instead, women internalize feelings of guilt surrounding the assault and abuse they suffer. In blaming themselves, many women are at risk for something I’ve begun to think of as “abuse recidivism,” which occurs when the violence they experience is repeated and almost normalized. Often the abuse isn’t consistent, and women convince themselves that the bad times won’t last. This cycle—in and out of abusive relationships—is something other researchers refer to as relationship churning.⁸ From youth onward, women may know the physical and emotional abuse is damaging at many levels, but they continue, supported by the belief that their partner will change or that the relationship is the only constant in their lives—living out Denise’s shopworn credo “It is what it is.”

“You gotta understand about Eric. He was abusive in so many ways. The trouble is, it wasn’t all the time.” Denise describes a familiar pattern: things would be peacefully happy, and she’d believe the worst was over. But the abuse would always start again, with increasing force. She would call the police and press charges, then renege after Eric begged for forgiveness. “I was so damn stupid. I kept telling myself he was taking care of me, that I couldn’t be without him—I needed him.”

Ironically, Eric was the one who needed Denise: his tattoo business wasn’t working out and he became increasingly disturbed. “He got so crazy, he said he was going to kill me and then kill himself—murder-suicide. I just kept thinking if I just loved him enough, supported him enough, it would be okay.” Every once in a while, she would catch a glimpse of the old Eric, kind and sensitive, and that fueled her hope. But in reality, Eric was deteriorating. He insisted Denise quit work and collect welfare, and abused her repeatedly. “He would hit me, I would run away, and then I would always go back. I thought he was the one who would always be there. I thought he would protect me.”

I thought he would protect me.

In their childhood and youth, women weren’t safe in their homes, within their families. Their fathers or stepfathers or brothers or cousins molested them, and they wanted someone—anyone—to protect them. In return for protection from these childhood predators, they paid the price of abuse over and over again, believing this was simply the way life was. And many women were fearful that no one else besides their boyfriend would desire them, no one else would take care of them. They depended on their boyfriends or husbands or partners emotionally and economically. Many of them hadn’t completed high school and most weren’t legally employed. Because of the abuse they suffered throughout their lives, they felt unattractive, unlovable, that only this man would want them. They were drowning in a tsunami of trauma and powerlessness. Denise, Rosa, and so many others believed they had no alternative—even with the abuse. If they lost their man, where would they go?

This was exactly what had happened to both Janeth and Ivy. When Janeth was abandoned by her mother, she immediately turned to her boyfriend, Luis. This was also the solution Ivy sought, but for both women it brought something they didn’t anticipate, intimate-partner violence. Luis cheated on Janeth. When she confronted him, he often beat her up. Still, when she became pregnant with Angelina, Luis pledged he’d never hit her again, that he’d be a good father.

Ivy was not so lucky. At seventeen, she became involved in an abusive relationship with Julio, an older gang member she lived with for eight years. There were drugs and violent fights, and often Ivy was afraid for her life. But she was equally fearful that she had nowhere to go. She was totally dependent on Julio, emotionally and economically. She’d seen what happened to her mother, and she didn’t want to wind up on the streets. Throughout this period, she worked, mainly part-time, at jobs that never paid enough to set her free. Finally, after finding a full-time job that paid a living wage, Ivy managed to leave the relationship. Six months later, Julio was killed in a gang shootout. In a morass of guilt and fear, Ivy sank into depression, finding solace in drugs and gangbanging.

It was then that she met Carlos and they began seeing each other; eventually they moved in together. Ivy wanted a peaceful life, a good job—and she then discovered she was pregnant. Neither Carlos nor she was ready for a baby, yet neither one of them would consider abortion. They both felt overwhelmed, and their anxiety translated into domestic violence. Carlos had already hit her a few times before; now the abuse escalated. The pregnancy was difficult: Ivy was often sick, but much of the time she’d miss doctor’s appointments. She wouldn’t even talk to her friends. Her face and body were so bruised and battered that she was ashamed for anyone to see what was happening to her. More than anything, she couldn’t believe that she was in the same situation again, with the same type of man. Only this time it was much worse. She’d believed that Carlos was different, she had believed she’d learned her lesson, she’d believed Carlos would take care of her. She thought she was safe with a new boyfriend. Instead, she was afraid for her life and didn’t know where to turn. Just like Janeth, she felt she had nowhere else to go, so she focused on her pregnancy, accepting that being battered was the price she had to pay.

Over and over again, my work exposed the prevalence of this dangerous belief. In recounting the experiences leading up to their incarceration, more than four out of five women, sixty-six in all, described domestic violence that ranged from hitting, whipping, and burning to torture, literal imprisonment and beatings that were so vicious it’s difficult to describe, let alone fathom. Yet, they stayed and endured the abuse because, as Ivy, Janeth, Rosa, and so many others had asked, “Who else would want me or would want to take care of me?”

What was the link between childhood trauma and violent adult relationships? As early as 1996, researchers found that sexual abuse in childhood was strongly linked to physical abuse by a partner and sexual assault in adulthood.⁹ Since then, this connection has been confirmed in over two decades of research. One study bluntly concluded that victims of childhood sexual assault were more likely to be assaulted after they turned sixteen years old than women who had not been sexually abused as children.¹⁰ Additionally, being sexually abused as a child increased the risk for mental health problems in adulthood, including anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality, and substance abuse along with greater risk of physical assault in adult relationships.¹¹ All these studies confirmed what so many formerly incarcerated women already knew: that their untreated trauma and the thoughts and feelings that surrounded it led women into desperate and violent relationships.

Despite the research, it’s difficult to adequately portray the relationship between formerly incarcerated women and ongoing trauma. It reminds me of the legal cases I’ve worked on that involved “gang enhancements”: individuals who’d been found guilty of charges received even harsher penalties added to their sentences if they were gang members. For these women, it’s as if there is a “trauma enhancement” in their lives—an added emotional penalty that can be traced back to what they experienced in childhood. Along the way, incarceration turbocharges the trauma women are already living through. This process is consistent, but the symptoms women exhibit are not. Some women act out violently, some become deeply depressed, some suffer with physical illness, and some experience a combination of physical, emotional, and mental struggles. This connection is clearly borne out by studies showing that women who experience multiple traumas suffer from even more severe symptoms.¹² Beyond this, the greater the severity and frequency of trauma and violence, the more intense the resulting symptoms.¹³

Rosa Lucero’s story followed this familiar, tragic pathway. After she fled being sex-trafficked by her mother with the man who enmeshed her in the cycle of gang life and crime, Rosa felt trapped in their relationship and left him. She wanted to try to be on her own and she wanted to get her son, Arturo, back. Instead, she was soon entangled in the juvenile justice system, sent away to a probation camp. After her release, she fell into another abusive relationship with the man who fathered her second child, her daughter, Pahola. They broke up, and she started yet another abusive relationship with the man with whom she would have a third child, Daniel. All of these relationships were filled with rage, violence, and cruelty. “We would fight and hit each other and stab each other, then sleep with each other and forget about it the next day.” Always, Rosa was acting out her pain. Neighbors awakened at night by the violence called the police, and her two children were removed by the Department of Children and Family Services. With all three of her children in foster homes, Rosa was beset with sorrow; she medicated her pain. “I just didn’t know how to stay sober,” Rosa explains, describing how she descended further into drug abuse and relationships with men who physically abused her and fed her addictions.

“Now I try not to think about it. I just want to live my life,” she tells me. But that’s a desire not easily fulfilled. To this day, the smallest thing, even a scent, triggers her memories. “One day I smelled Old Spice, and I really thought I was going to throw up. It reminded me of one of the men who abused me.” Rosa is courageously open about the multiple ways she has tried to deal with the emotional impact of trauma over the years, from substance misuse and self-medication to eating disorders in the form of bulimia. “I used to make myself throw up because I felt so dirty inside,” she tells me. “I just wanted to cleanse myself—that went on for a lot of years.”

Rosa’s insights, while heartbreaking, are actually a sign of her deep internal strength. Over the years, she never lied to herself and she never told herself that anything she was experiencing was normal. And now she is very clear that she was wrong to believe that a man would be the answer. “I kept thinking,” she remembers, “how could anyone love me when my mother didn’t love me? When she just turned me out? She didn’t take care of me. And, so, I kept going to men who really didn’t love me either, thinking they’d take care of me. I should have known: the only person who could take care of me was myself. I had to learn that. And I did. And I know that’s what helped me get my kids back.”

When I hear Rosa describe her realization that she had to take care of herself, my thoughts drift to Denise. An hour later, I get a text. “G-ma-it’s def. Dr. says am pregnant.”