Two weeks after I returned to California from India, I met Jackie. She wasn’t a criminal, just a kid who became affiliated with a gang at age thirteen. Her parents weren’t looking out for her, gang activity was the norm in her neighborhood, and no one on earth seemed cooler than the gang member she fell in love with. He briefly made her feel cherished, like someone who mattered. Next thing she knew, she was pregnant, and locked up. Jackie never even saw the life she gave birth to. There was no time for attachment, or mourning, or even consciousness. She ended up feeling she’d never even had a baby.

Jackie got out on parole and almost immediately got pregnant again. Once again, she served just as a body. The baby came out and then the baby was gone.

For three years, I worked with students at the Los Angeles opportunity school that pregnant girls as young as twelve can choose to attend. These are kids who’ve been “abandoned” by parents who work all the time to keep a roof over their heads. They’ve grown up in the streets, educated by the influence of the media and then pressured into sexuality at a very early age. They end up getting pregnant in the first or second experience of having a penis inside of them. I was amazed to learn most of these girls did not know what a clitoris was. They’d never heard that females could experience orgasm. Even those who did have information about condoms and other ways of avoiding pregnancy didn’t think it could happen at age twelve or thirteen. They were children who had bodies capable of reproducing life, though their minds and souls didn’t yet know much about what life really is.

We live in a culture where kids are constantly sexualized: by rap music, television commercials, porn sites on the Internet, mainstream fashion and more. Yet the honest discussion is silenced. It seems nothing is as taboo in our society as sex.

When I facilitate groups, there’s a theater game I play in which I invite people to create a machine. One person begins making a mechanical, repetitive motion. Someone joins in onstage adding another action; someone joins and adds a third movement until an entire machine is working away before our eyes. I say “The machine is sad,” and everyone continues moving, but dejectedly now, and with sighs. “The machine is happy,” and the rhythm turns bouncy and fast. I turn the machine into a serial killer and people go along with it, vicious and menacing. But almost every time, especially if I’m working with adults, when I say, “the machine is horny,” everyone stops, embarrassed.