“What belongs to you but is used more by others?”

It was the typical start of a Sunday program, I had searched hard for some form of ice breaker or question to engage the girls at the detention center with when they first walked in. Though hoping for a better tie-in to the theme of our discussion that day, I settled with a riddle I had seen multiple places online. The girls filed in, they took their seats, they responded to our greetings. It was the first riddle I asked, a simple mind trick that questioned “What belongs to you but is used more by others?”. The answer is, “your name”. However, it was I who was tricked by the question when without missing a beat, two girls simultaneously responded with “your body”.
‘What belongs to you but is used more by others?’ ‘Your body’.

Their response hit me like a ton of bricks, the ease and rapidity of their reply solidified the reality that these girls have experienced life in a body that is used more by others but is suppose to belong to them. It’s typical to learn that the majority of the girls we work with have encountered sexual abuse at staggeringly young ages. We give them surveys about their sexual experiences to determine if they have experienced trafficking and we frequently are returned with the x’s and checks marked next to “yes” when asked “Has anyone ever made you have sex when you didn’t want to, either through physical violence, threats, or making you feel like you couldn’t say no?”. Right beneath the question there is a space to indicate at what age they first experienced said trauma, I’ve seen girls answer as young as 2 ½.

For these young women, I think about how they never had a chance to grow comfortably into their bodies. I reflect on my own coming of age as the teenagers they are now, and the discomfort, the uncertainty, the unfamiliarity with my physical self that naturally through time was resolved. I had the privilege to grow into who I am and the body God gave me, it is part of how I find my identity in him and how I learn to reconcile the flesh with the spirit. I think again about the true answer to the riddle, ‘your name’, and how much our names, though not chosen by us, define who we are. We are identified by our names, we are identified by our bodies. But the two young girls who have identified their bodies as belonging to others, much like all the women and girls in prostitution, are trapped in a body that others have taken so much from, and left little identity to be found. I wonder in hurt of the difficulties they face in trying to find their true identity and home in Christ, and pray that they relate and understand his broken body on the cross as the core of their identity, beyond any body that any one has misused.

There’s a brief pause after they first answer my question, I absorb the weight of their response in a painful private moment, and move on.

“Every human body has been given a new hope of belonging eternally to the God who created it. Thanks to the Incarnation, you can bring your body home” -Henri Nouwen