ROBERT PRICE: Sex for drugs: At 13, the devoted girl thought she was helping ‘housework’ | Robert Price

Some mothers stand with their young daughters in front of grocery stores and sell raffle tickets or Girl Scout cookies.

Dess Perkins’ mother used to stand outside a downtown mini market and sell her daughter.

They stood side by side, 40 feet from the front door of what was then a 7-Eleven convenience store, the drug-addicted mother and her freshly scented 13-year-old daughter. At the appointed time, a drug dealer would arrive, stop, and pay the mother – almost always in drugs. The girl slid into the front passenger seat and they were off to a motel on Union Avenue, just another nervous customer and his still-developing two-hour crime.

For nearly four years, this was the life of Odessa “Dess” Perkins – her contribution, as her mother called her, to “home”. Fortnightly welfare checks never quite covered food, rent, and his mother’s drug of choice, PCP, a mind-numbing recreational anesthetic also known as angel dust. So Dess would pitch in so she and her six younger siblings could eat — or so it was described to her.

More than 30 years later, Dess Perkins is still caring for children.

Now, however, it is as an intervention counselor at Bakersfield High School, her alma mater. Perkins’ classroom in the frosty old Warren Hall is about 500 yards from the parking lot of the convenience store at the corner of California Avenue and H Street where her mother once delivered her to an estate of drug and drug dealers. other legal rapists.

And, yes, the subject was brought up in school. Every Monday, in each of her classes, Perkins guides her students through something she calls “circle.”

“That’s where we sit and talk about stuff, real life,” Perkins said. “I’ll hear things that – I’m just in awe, and not all of them in a good way. And I’ll think back to all the things I’ve been through. So when I talk to them, I can literally say, “I’ve been in your shoes. The first thing a student will say to you is, “No, you don’t know, you don’t know my life. And I’ll say, ‘You know what? In fact, I do.

And, yes, there’s a good chance she will.

Sexual abuse? To verify. Her late mother’s boyfriend nursed her for about a year and had penetrative sex with her when she was 7 years old.

Blood Incest? To verify. When Perkins’ mother was sentenced to four months in Kern County’s Lerdo Jail, the children were sent to live with a relative who told the girl, then in middle school, that if she didn’t agree to his demands every night he would. assault his siblings. Perkins got drunk every afternoon before he went home and nodded.

Criminal acts? To verify. Perkins was arrested for shoplifting in the Valley Plaza mall as she attempted to comply with another of her mother’s ongoing demands. For a time, she ran with a street gang, the only group of people she said she liked. She committed a theft; she assaulted someone with a gun, a felony. (His record was expunged in February 2000.)

If this all sounds like the resume — or obituary — of a lifelong criminal or mental hospital inmate, that’s because it easily could have been. Perkins survived.

“I was in the belly of the beast,” said Perkins, now 49. “I was on earth but I was living in hell. Every day. Then a school counselor at BHS, Ruscel Reader, started talking to me. She bought me clothes. She had food in her office. She m checked. She’s like, ‘What’s up with you? You’re going to graduate, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do that. She was the first person who ever took care of me.

The reader remembers the girl and not so much the girl’s specific issues. “I just remember how wonderful she was,” Reader said.

“She was getting into a lot of conflicts,” Reader said. “I just talked to him and said, ‘Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?’ I helped the children to understand their value, that they were a child of God and that they could do whatever they wanted to do.

Reader credits Perkins for wanting to connect with her — and with herself.

“You have to find your voice — find yourself in all this disarray,” Reader said. “Then you go ahead with that and look for someone who will hear you. You just have to find that person. It could be a teacher, it could be a janitor, it could be a cafeteria worker. There’s someone there that you can connect with, and if you keep an eye on it, you’ll find that person.

The reader referenced a song she said she sometimes sings in church that some teachers, janitors and cafeteria workers seem to happily pick up: “If I can help somebody while I’m passing / If I can encourage someone with a word or a song / If I can show someone how badly they travel / Then my life won’t be in vain.

Perkins was eventually placed in foster care – a healthy, loving foster family. When a judge finally gave him the option of returning to his mother, Perkins refused. At that time, she had a job. Taco Bell! $4.25 an hour! And then she got her GED.

But she still wasn’t free. In her twenties, she had a succession of unhealthy and abusive relationships, including one that lasted 12 years and produced three children, all now adults. “I had no self-esteem,” she said. “And it’s a cycle, unfortunately, that we go through when things like that happen to us.”

In her early to mid-thirties, she began to emerge. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Cal State Bakersfield in 2007 and a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix in 2010. But she still wasn’t whole. When she enrolled at LaVerne University to pursue counseling studies, she was dismayed to learn that she would have to complete 10 counseling sessions herself, the standard for the degree she was seeking.

“I’m like, ‘I don’t need advice. When I go there, I don’t tell him anything. I’m going to be hardcore. She doesn’t know me. And I went in there and she was like, ‘What’s your name?’ And I cried like a newborn. Perkins fulfilled the counseling requirement and then signed up for additional sessions.

The experience etched a lesson in her brain that she now shares with anyone she thinks could benefit from it: Speak your truth. Tell your story.

Perkins earned her counseling degree in 2019 and her teaching degree, also from LaVerne, in 2021. Along the way, she wrote and published a short, gruesome, and triumphant memoir titled “Warrior” ($14.95, dessperkins.com).

She is rebuilding her relationship with her 66-year-old mother, who was convicted of drug addiction and child abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s and, according to Perkins, is now essentially a paraplegic due to a host of health issues. drug-related health.

“It’s a little tense because for a long time I haven’t forgiven him,” Perkins said. “I had to realize that you have to be okay with the apologies you never get.” Luckily, Perkins said, she has a good relationship with her siblings.

Perkins has become something of a poster boy for the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, which recently launched a human trafficking task force – modeled after the one in Orange County – that brings law enforcement together , government social services and non-profit organizations. The objective: to get victims of trafficking out of their situation quickly and safely and to prosecute the traffickers and their accomplices. Training is available and encouraged for teachers, counselors, parents, hotel and motel professionals and others. (For training details, call 661-868-2340. To escape trafficking or abuse, call 911.)

Perkins is grateful to her mother for one thing: the sense of purpose she inadvertently instilled in her daughter.

“I decided I would never be like my mother,” Perkins said. “After all the bad things my mom did to me, she also taught me one thing that can stand the test of time: never be like her.”

Robert Price is a reporter for KGET-TV. His column appears here on Sundays; The opinions expressed are his own. Contact him at [email protected] or via Twitter: @stubblebuzz.


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