Teaching Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like Us on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children « Feminist Teacher

Teaching Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like Us on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children « Feminist Teacher:

Teaching Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like Us on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children

by feministteacher

My student, Genevieve, interviews Rachel Lloyd, founder and director of GEMS, about her memoir Girls Like Us at our annual GEMS assembly (photo courtesy, Laura Hahn).

In the spring of 2009, I was searching for something to make my then new high school feminism course have a sense of purpose. I wanted to teach students not just feminist theory and literature but how to learn and care strongly about an issue to mobilize them to action and advocacy.
My students wanted more out of the course, too. One after another, they–both girls and guys–shared in their course evaluations that they wanted to learn about a current issue involving girls and women that they could rally around. I took their request seriously.
That spring, I chanced upon a screening of Very Young Girls (2008) at Bluestockings, a radical feminist