Rachel Lloyd
Founder and Executive Director, Girls Education and Mentoring ServicesMovement: Anti-Trafficking
Rachel Lloyd has worked for 13 years with young women and girls who have survived commercial sexual exploitation—young women like herself. She first came to the United States in 1997 as a missionary working with adult women in the sex industry, but she soon realized that girls and young women were being stigmatized and shunned by traditional social services. As a result, in 1999 Rachel founded
Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, GEMS. The organization is now the nation’s largest and the only of its kind in New York to offer direct services to girls and young women who’ve survived domestic trafficking or commercial exploitation. GEMS helps young women and girls address their legal issues, provides transitional housing and trauma-based therapy, and offers educational opportunities. All of these efforts are focused on helping survivors see themselves as leaders rather than rescuing them: “It is the empowerment of these survivors that I see as the greatest opportunity to completely eradicate commercial sexual exploitation,” says Rachel. “It will become critical to have informed leaders who are trained to think about, talk about, and motivate others to take action in a whole new context.” Indeed, Rachel sees far-reaching implications for what these young leaders can achieve: “In ten years, I hope that it will be considered ludicrous that girls were treated as criminals when they had been victimized by exploiters. It is my goal to see the fight against commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking become part of our collective social movements.”
Shortly after she came to the United States, Rachel began her career as a leader among youth survivors, helping to draft a declaration and agenda for action at the First International Summit of Sexually Exploited Youth. She presented that declaration at the United Nations and saw it ratified by 120 countries. Rachel co-founded the New York City Task Force Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children; she organized and hosted both the first US Summit of Sexually Exploited Youth (2003) and the first congressional briefing on sexual exploitation (2004). She is an Ashoka fellow and has won the Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (2008) and the Reebok International Human Rights Award (2006). Rachel holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Marymount Manhattan College and a master’s degree in applied urban anthropology from City College of New York. She was the co-executive producer of the Showtime documentary Very Young Girls and her memoir, Girls Like Us, will be published by Harper Collins in the spring of 2011.
