Her Street Name was Tid Bit

Her street name was Tid Bit. I never met her, but I’ll never forget her.

I was doing street outreach downtown with my teammates Laura and Dot. We had a drop-in center for prostituted women that was headquartered in one of the roughest neighborhoods of the city. The one where the police would get mad at us for walking the streets because they were afraid we would get hurt.

One week I stayed behind at the drop-in the two other women went out walking the streets, looking for “daughters of the city” as Dot called them—prostituted women in need of a warm meal and someone to care about them.

When my two teammates returned, they told me about a girl they had met. They were walking along a deserted street when out of an alley way, a young teen girl came running toward them, gasping and clinging to them as soon as she reached them.

“What happened?” Laura asked.

Through panicked tears, the girl’s story spilled out in broken pieces. “He raped me.”

“Who?”

“I know him. He’s back there. Please don’t contact the police. Take me to my family.”

By now Laura recognized her. Her street name was Tid Bit, and she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. The last time Laura has seen her, Tid Bit had ducked away from our volunteers. Whether from fear or shame, we didn’t know, but this time she was clinging to Laura, begging to go home.

Laura and Dot did as Tid Bit asked and dropped her off back at her “family,” which turned out to be a young man who was most likely her pimp. When the two ladies returned and told me the story, I was shocked.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked. “Tid Bit knew who he was, and they could have easily arrested him.”

“Being a prostitute is illegal,” Dot explained. “They’d put her in jail before they put him in jail.”

The next week that we did outreach, we didn’t see Tid Bit. We found out from other ladies on the street that after Laura and Dot had dropped her off, she’d gone out with her pimp for a little hunting. They had found the guy who raped her, and the pimp had shot him. So then the police caught them, and put both her and her pimp in jail for homicide. And we knew from the other ladies on the street that jail was just as dangerous as their neighborhood, since they told us stories of being raped even while in jail.

After outreach that day, I got in my car and it hit me: no one was crying over Tid Bit. She was fifteen, but rape was all in a day’s work for her. If I’d come home and told my mom I’d been raped, it would instantly have been a family crisis, a church crisis, even a community crisis. But not in this neighborhood. Not for Tid Bit.

As I turned on my car to drive away, the words of David Crowder started playing from my radio: “Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal.”