FAST LITTLE GIRL

When I heard the term "fast girls" growing up, it was always used to describe young girls who wore clothes meant for adults, wore makeup, enticed boys or grown men, and ended up getting pregnant at a young age. I was labeled "fast" when I was 12 because I wore shorts and a top that was too tight due to my developing body. I couldn’t help how I looked and didn’t understand why I was developing the way I did.

As a 12-year-old, I was already insecure about my changing body, and it didn’t help when an adult told my mother that my outfit was too revealing. Grown men would approach me and talk to me as if I were an adult. Really? I ended up hating the way I looked and always found ways to cover up so that I didn’t give grown men an excuse to bother me.

At 15 years old, I had my first near-rape experience. While living in Atlanta, my mother would make my sister and I walk to a corner store to buy her cigarettes. When I asked why she didn’t do it herself, she scolded me and even threatened me if I didn’t go. The real reason was that a group of older men loitered around the store, saying salacious things to young girls. One even placed his hand on me and gripped my arm hard when I didn’t respond.

My sister and I managed to flee before any harm was done, and I voiced my fear of going to that store again. But my mom, being who she was, said she worked too hard to worry about my fears and blamed me for wearing the outfit I had on. I was crushed—a mother is supposed to fight tooth and nail for her children, especially her daughters. Instead of confronting those men, she decided to get her cigarettes from a store near her job.

When I had my first child, a little girl, I was careful about how she was dressed and made sure she was covered up "properly." It wasn’t until one day my husband confronted me and said, “It’s not what a child wears; it’s the grown-ass adult who has a problem with what a child is wearing.” He was right. I was placing the blame on the wrong person, and it wasn’t my baby.

An article of clothing doesn’t give a person the right to objectify or harm someone innocent and simply being a child. Sexualizing a child is the worst, and those who take part in this are the lowest of humans out there. They are just as bad as the pedophiles—they might as well hand our children over to these freaks, because, in their eyes, a child was asking for it.