Selling American girls

If he knew the identity of Stacey’s pimp, Gallagher, who runs the South Bureau Los Angeles Human Trafficking Task Force, would have an easier time of finding her. Pimps there operate much like narcotics gangs, each with his own turf or stretch of blocks where his girls work. If you know a pimp, you know where he places his girls. And if Gallagher found Stacey, he might be able to find her pimp, since the men tend to brand the girls with their monikers — their pimp names, often under a crown. Sometimes the tattoos are crude; other times, they’re in an almost girlish twirly script, like an ad for a cupcake shop or a princess costume.

But he doesn’t know who manipulated Stacey into jumping in and out of vehicles with men doing car tricks. He doesn’t know the name of the man she calls Daddy in her text messages to another girl, fretting that she needs to give him her money before she can eat or repay money she borrowed so she could eat.

“This little girl is driving me crazy,” says Gallagher, squinting into the dark as he drives through South Los Angeles, an area he sums up in four words: “Churches and liquor stores.”

He and Officer Andrew Gonzalez drive up and down Fig for hours, day or night, whenever they can find the time, going back and forth on the radio, block to block, looking for Stacey, whose face sometimes seems to appear on other girls and then, mirage-like, disappear.

Stacey might not be the face of human trafficking for most, but she is a typical victim of domestic human trafficking in the United States: an American girl with more troubles than advantages, targeted by a predatory pimp and trafficked in her own town, in her own neighborhood, even.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, minors make up roughly half the victims of human trafficking in the U.S. and are the victims of the fastest-growing criminal enterprise after drug trafficking — worth an estimated $32 billion a year worldwide

Data from the National Human Trafficking Resouce Center indicate that of the 4,168 cases of trafficking in the U.S. reported on the center’s hotline in 2014, close to 3,100 of them involved sex trafficking. The data, released by Polaris, an anti-slavery nongovernmental organization, also show that roughly one third of those cases involved minors.

The fight against this kind of human trafficking is Sisyphean, with front-liners like Gallagher hoping for nothing more than maybe moving the racket to another area. “The most I can hope for is to displace it,” he says.

Night after night, day after day, he and his team go out, and “it never, ever slows down. It never stops,” says Gonzalez, who, like Gallagher, is the father of a teenage girl — a fact that never drifts far from their minds as they look at the faces of the girls they encounter.

When they describe the things they’ve seen — looking for missing girls as young as 11 or seeing what one violent pimp or another did to a girl — their cop masks, the face of calm while cuffing a john or questioning a stoned passenger of a hot-boxed car about missing girls, drop for a moment. Even after all their years of policing these streets, they still get incredibly invested in finding girls like Stacey, ready to take apart a neighborhood stone by stone to find to her.

Gallagher and his team seem to have developed a kind of super street vision. They can see a shadow move in the dark, sense a sideways glance from faces tilted away from them. Time and time again, driving around the poorly lit blocks, Gallagher would see a shadow in his peripheral vision and break off midsentence to radio Gonzalez before turning to chase down the shadow, but none of them turned out to be Stacey that night.

Gallagher’s familiar with the faces, the cars and the blocks, and he keeps hoping that others might come to know them and that developers will discover the area.

“These people don’t even have a Starbucks,” he says. This might not sit with those who fret about gentrification, but he would rather see people scowling over Frappuccino sales than dealing with the liquor store that charges girls $5 per trick to let them use its backroom.

“People gotta walk their kids to school past that … and all these motels that exist just for this,” says Gallagher, who says he has been writing Magic Johnson Enterprises, hoping it will go in, invest and draw some more-upscale businesses to Fig.

“Why can’t they come here and do what they did in the Bronx?” he asks, referring to Johnson’s efforts in the New York City borough, where he has attracted big box businesses such as Best Buy.

For now, there are no Starbucks on Fig. Although the girls who work the streets stop by McDonald’s and Jack in the Box now and again, they are monitored by pimps in vehicles in the parking lot, tracking the kids they sell to pretty much anyone who asks.

Motels are key players in the sex trafficking trade, sometimes complicit ones, sometimes reluctant.

In the 108 Motel parking lot, as Gallagher’s team handcuffs a john and the woman he tried to buy on a sunny Friday morning, the motel’s owner, Amit Shah, looks on, hands clasped behind his back.

“I don’t want this here … but they don’t listen,” he says of the pimps and johns. He points to a scar on his head and says that the last time he asked a pimp to take his business elsewhere, the pimp “glassed” him with a broken bottle.

As Officer Vanessa Rios sorts through the young woman’s purse, the woman, who goes by Cupcakes, explains why she’s there: Her baby is with her pimp.

“I just needed some cash. It’s hard being single,” she says. She’s not totally single, though. She has “MS” tattooed on her; Rios says this makes the woman’s pimp a guy who goes by MacSauce, a member of the Denver Lane Bloods. He owns her.

The motels are also staging sites for stings.

In a room in the 77th Street precinct, the plan for the night’s sting is laid out like a play on the field: undercover female officers there and there, with two sets of eyes watching them from there and there. Around the corner, in a motel with lumpy beds that smell like urinal cake, two rooms are rented out. Once the john agrees to a price and accompanies one of the female officers to a room — boom — he is cuffed.

He’s taken to a room where the officers ask for identification, fill out forms and place the men’s belongings in plastic bags. It’s a very smooth procedure, which the officers repeat, over and over.

Within a couple of hours, they’ve busted four guys, from a former bank robber to the private chef for a priest. The men sit in the motel room, handcuffed. There are mirrors on three walls and the ceiling. They have nowhere to look but down.

The variety of men engaged in purchasing sex across the U.S. is staggering.

He could be a billionaire like Jeffrey Epstein. He could be the director of counterterrorism at the State Department. He could be the affable face of a fast-food franchise peddling low-calorie sandwiches. Or he could be a teacher, a nurse, someone’s uncle, father, husband. He is always, certainly, someone’s son.

The problem is that no one knows how many johns are out there.

There are no comprehensive stats for how many are arrested each year, be it for trying to purchase sex with an adult, as the men at the LA john school were, or for trying to purchase sex with a minor.

There is smattering of numbers — for example, from this year’s three-month National Johns Supression Initiative, during which 961 johns were arrested in 18 states by 39 local law enforcement agencies. The feds were not involved.

There is no national database on the number of johns arrested annually. Some estimates have john arrests accounting for as little as 10 percent of sex-trafficking arrests made in the U.S.

Michael Osborne, the chief of the FBI’s violent crimes against children unit, recognizes the issue of almost hopelessly limited resources in the face of the nationwide problem.

The focus of his work, he said, is “recovering young boys or girls that are being victimized. Period.” (The majority of the minors trafficked for sex in the U.S. are female. In a nationwide sting conducted by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies this fall, 149 minors were recovered. Of those, three were transgender, and three were male.)

Pimps, he said, “represent the national threat.” They move among cities and states in order to avoid being identified. They are targeted by the FBI.

The johns, he said, stay in their communities and are left for local law enforcement agencies to deal with. Precincts, counties and states keep track of john arrests in different ways, if at all.

“Nobody will touch the numbers thing,” said Rachel Lloyd, the founder of GEMS, a New York–based educational and mentoring service targeting girls and young women who have been trafficked for sex.

“The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking,” the most recent and most expansive report on the subject, published in 2009, noted that “victims of domestic minor sex trafficking are frequently processed as juvenile delinquents or adult prostitutes” while those who buy them are “not being recognized as a critical component in the sex trafficking of children.”

Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, an NGO that focuses on preventing sex trafficking, said she was shocked to find how prevalent the problem is. The common refrain, she said, was “We don’t have that here.”

Lina Nealon, the director of Boston-based Demand Abolition, said that enforcement of the laws is a major issue, as is the lightness of the punishment. “The problem isn’t necessarily laws. It’s implementation. The severity of the crime doesn’t match the penalty,” she said, adding that if buyers are fined $500, as they are in come cases, “they’re not going to take it seriously.”

Source: Demanding Justice Project fact sheet. Graphic by Alex Newman/Al Jazeera America.

The men attending the LA john school ranged in age from college student to grandfather and had mixed reactions to what they heard. Some focused on the presentations with concern, disgust and shame. A few seemed bored, some cracked jokes and exchanged knowing smiles, and others seemed genuinely bewildered.

“What is that?” asked one man as a photo of what could have passed for a close-up shot of a fleshy coral reef flashed on a large screen during the STD presentation.

“A vagina,” deadpanned the expert.

The men gasped, some offering a hushed “Ugh.” Photos of things revealed to be diseased penises and scrotums popped up, and the men collectively winced. Some protectively moved their hands over their privates.

The news that odds are they at some point had sex with an underage girl — in presentations by retired law enforcement and a former sex worker — was a punch that did not land.

During a coffee break, some said they felt fairly certain that the sex workers they had been with liked what they were doing and were into it.

Most were concerned about how their lives could be affected by their actions — losing a job, contracting a disease or losing a partner.

Two segments resonated with the men the most: The possible legal repercussions if they are arrested on the same charges again (“Can I still get a job?”) and the presentation by three recovering sex addicts on how their behavior shredded their personal and professional lives.

Some of the men looked ashen as the sex addicts — three high-achieving, successful men — laid out their humiliating stories. All the jokes, guffawing and even eye rolling stopped as the johns sat, rapt, listening to the sex addicts’ painful details.

One of the sex addicts, for instance, spoke of the time he returned home to find his preteen daughter had locked herself in a closet for several hours, terrified after she saw a rape fantasy video that he had downloaded onto a shared computer.

“I learned a lot of things about me I didn’t know,” said Pablo, plump and 45, who said he divorced his wife because he thought she didn’t sexually satisfy him, only to find himself in the same pattern of behavior with his new partner.

A few of the johns did not seem to think what was being presented even applied to them.

One man, who let slip that he had been picked up for a similar offense in Texas, repeatedly referred to himself as a “humanitarian” because he took the time to “talk to the young ladies.”

Another said that the sessions didn’t really resonate with him, since he wasn’t guilty of trying to pick up a prostitute for sex. “I drive a Hummer. That attracts the girls,” he said, smiling.

At the end of the day, picking up their certificates of completion, several men walked over to Bill Margolis, a co-founder of the program in Los Angeles, and shook his hand, seemingly moved by what they heard or the chance to avoid jail — this time.

The scared-straight approach seems to be effective. Margolis said that of the 1,618 men who have completed the program in eight years, he knows of only four who have reoffended.

There’s not much consistent data on repeat offenders, and there is no federal mandate to go after them.

“There isn’t any emphasis on going after buyers,” said Michael Shively, a senior associate with Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studies crime and justice. His research shows that targeting demand significantly reduces prostitution.

“Almost everyone, including the feds, knows you’re not going to impact the problem — not in any sort of lasting, preventive way — without dealing with the driver of it, and that’s the demand … There’s an empty space when it comes to going after the buyers.”

So despite the arrests, there’s still a tacit understanding that buying sex — even from a minor — is just what men do. Summing up the general mindset, Lloyd said, “It’s not like they were trying to buy a child or someone chained to a wall. You know, men have needs.”

“There’s that mentality that’s taking a really long time to address,” she said. “We’ve got a really long way to go on how we see adult men who do the buying and how culpable we find them.”

Kimbel was turned out at the age of 14 by a pimp named T, who found her in the parking lot of a gas station in College Town, Maryland. She was raped by a friend at the age of 12. This happened shortly before her father, a controlling alcoholic, died, leaving her with her waitress mother and three siblings.

The combination of the trauma from the rape and her father’s death sent Kimbel, who was, by her description, “still very much a child,” into a tailspin of attention-seeking behavior — shoplifting, taking drugs and drinking. She felt as if she were to blame for the rape.

“My mother’s favorite thing to say was, ‘Self-inflicted injuries get no sympathy,’” said Kimbel.

When she met T, she said, “he had a couple of girls with him and asked me and my friends if we wanted to go to a party.” That party, at a motel across the street from that gas station, ended up being six weeks of being locked up, forced to have sex with a string of random men and staying high to cope.

“I was so sure that someone would tell my mother where I was. I was six blocks from my house,” said Kimbel. The gas station was visible from her home.

She turned 15 in that motel room, and one day, after waking up “with foam and blood” all over her as a result of excessive cocaine use, she managed to sneak out, going by taxi from friend to friend before ending up at her uncle’s home, too angry to go to her mother.

Just as well. Her mother had packed up and moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, while she was missing — a detail that Kimbel, now a married mother of two — can’t get over.

Her uncle took her to her mother, and things did not go well. So when Jazzy showed up and asked her to run away to New York, Kimbel was ecstatic.

They never made it to New York, because Jazzy drove to D.C. and had her walk the streets there, earning money for him.

It wasn’t until her second arrest, a few months later, that Kimbel came into contact with the right officer, the kind of cop who had the sensibility to deal with a very troubled, exploited kid.

“A lot of us have experienced rape by a cop. A lot of us have experienced traumatic arrests. So to have a cop stand there and say ‘No matter what, I’ll be here to help you’ is what makes the difference,’” said Kimbel.

Lisa Thurau, the executive director of Strategies for Youth, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that the failure to identify a minor who has been commercially exploited for sex is “extremely harmful. The impacts are both short term and long term. When “officers sink to that level” — insulting and berating a minor rather than protecting her — “she’s going to be scorned” and not feel she can seek help.

Andrea Powell, the executive director of FAIR Girls, which is based in Washington, D.C., and helps victimized and trafficked girls, said that most of the girls who end up being targeted by pimps come from troubled households or have been abused, often sexually.

Ashley, who was 13 when she was first arrested on prostitution charges in Baltimore, was taken from her mother soon after birth because, she said, her mother had a drug problem.

After her father died, she was put in a foster home.

“That kind of fucked my head up a little bit,” she said in an interview two years ago. Al Jazeera has kept track of her via her contact with FAIR Girls and Powell for the past year.

“It’s just sad. You’ve got little fucking girls doing this shit, sleeping with old-assed men,” said Ashley, who was still “in the life” at the time. “I’ve done it, but that shit is not where it’s at.”

Her sense of self-worth did not improve after she left her pimp and starting working the streets on her own. “I might sit here on the outside and think that I look all good, but on the inside, I feel like shit. You sit here and talk about it, and you just think about it, and it’s like, ‘This is really what I do?’ This shit is sad,” she said.

“When I was locked up, someone asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years.’ I can honestly say I don’t.”

But that was then. Ashley dropped off the radar for a while, touching base with Powell only periodically. She is currently off the streets and is expecting her first child.

Getting girls like Ashley the support they need, said Thurau, needs to be the mandate of not just one agency or another; what’s needed, she said, is a comprehensive approach. “Until the community changes that perspective, I don’t think the police will. And the communities really have to clamor and collaborate and demand,” she said.

“We should be dumping resources on 12-to-14-year-olds, surrounding them with love and attention so that recruiters, gangs and exploitation and trafficking don’t have a chance in hell,” she said.

She described the army of adults who set a path to court and solicitation charges for an exploited teenage girl and asked, “Where were the 12 adults at the front end?”

“I’d like to tell you that that was the end of my story. It was not,” she said.

By that point, she was a teenage mother who came from “a lot of dysfunction” — an alcoholic father, a “tough” mother who never told her she loved her. Her daughter’s father was pressuring Morrissey to provide for him, but she was “no good at shoplifting,” she said. Caught up in the scene at the Combat Zone, she ended up selling herself on the streets, where a light-skinned black girl like her, the target of ridicule in her neighborhood, was popular with men.

She soon learned to tell the difference between a john and an undercover cop. She lived among “the misfits” for 14 years, developing a serious drug habit in the meantime. By the time she was 30, was turning tricks for $5.

Pregnant with her second child in 1993, Morrissey said she had “a moment of clarity” and went into detox. She has been clean since May of that year and since 2004 has been running groups and mentoring girls like her through My Life My Choice, a Boston-based Justice Research Institute program aimed at fighting exploitation and trafficking of girls.

They provide the girls with education, health care, leadership, job training — whatever they need. “We meet the girls where they are,” said Morrissey, now 52.

Sometimes, that place is very rough. She recently took one girl and her child to the doctor. Both mother and baby were in pediatric care.

There are many obstacles that block a trafficked girl’s path out of exploitation — laws and institutions that often fail them, damaged adults who trade on their bodies and a community that casts harsh moral judgment. But there is also help.

In most major U.S. cities, there are nonprofit groups and networks of social workers, volunteers and even former survivors like Morrissey.

They scour the streets and answer calls from referring agencies at all hours, working to stitch together the busted social safety net, making all the difference in the life of a girl in trouble.

Among these activists and agitators is Andrea Powell, the executive director of FAIR Girls, which is based in Washington, D.C., and helps trafficked girls get back in school, find jobs and get medical help.

She runs her outfit out of an address with an undisclosed location — pimps tend to go looking for their girls — and secret apartments that shelter girls referred to her by police or social services.

“I’ve seen everything, trust me,” said Powell. But even she is occasionally shocked. She recalled an incident when a social worker called her about a 10-year-old girl who had been picked up outside a local strip club.

“She’s promiscuous. She can’t keep her legs together,” the social worker told Powell, who promptly thought, “She’s 10! Ten-year-olds are not promiscuous!”

Powell said the child barely understood what had happened, using phrases like “good touching” and “bad touching” to try to describe what had been done to her before resorting to drawing pictures to show what she had suffered.

“She had no idea what words to even use,” said Powell.

If even a social worker can grant that kind of agency to a child, it’s not much of a stretch to see how others — even foster parents — might see teenage girls as adults.

So FAIR Girls also trains foster parents how to look for the red flags that indicate a girl is being groomed, such as a change in how she dresses and having expensive things she can’t explain. And knowing that trafficked girls are now sold not only on streets but also online, Powell and her colleagues scour sites like Backpage.com, looking at photos of girls with their faces hidden and blurred. Pimps often do that to hide how young the girls are, but the underdeveloped bodies, awkwardly posed in garish lingerie, tend to be a giveaway.

In one instance, they found a girl advertised as “Juicy hot lips”; her body appeared to be that of a prepubescent or barely pubescent girl. They copied her phone number and ran a Google search on it. Bingo — a site used by johns reviewing girls they purchased came up. A couple of the reviews indicated that the girl looked young in person too, though that did not seem to deter the johns.

The FAIR Girls workers reported what they saw to the police, but, they said, given the number of such listings, they don’t always have time to follow up.

Law enforcement is generally savvy about where to find the pimps; they are where the girls are, where runaways congregate, in areas with foster homes and group homes. But when it comes to how authorities treat abused girls, there remains a wide chasm between underage girls who are molested and ones who are seen as child prostitutes — a term no longer used by those who help exploited girls.

While things are changing somewhat in cities like New York and Washington, there’s a still a long way to go, said Rachel Lloyd, the founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS), a New York–based organization focusing on girls and young women who have been trafficked.

Lloyd, a survivor of sex trafficking as a teen in the U.K. and Germany, has been at the forefront of the fight to have minors trafficked into the sex industry recognized as victims.

“Up until 2008, when in New York we passed the first safe harbor law, people didn’t even think of it as a problem. It was just par for the course. If you’re a child or a juvenile who was engaged in commercial sex, then you were arrested and charged,” she said. “Even though in any other case, they would be victims of statutory rape and the adult who bought them would be the criminal.”

“In cases of statutory rape, you don’t have plausible deniability,” said Lloyd. “Saying ‘Oh, I didn’t know how old she was’ isn’t actually a defense.”

She said it took about five years to get the bill passed. She added, “There are around 30 states in the nation that don’t see this as a problem and haven’t caught up their laws to see this as an issue of victimization.”

This is partly because society sees trafficked girls as knowing and complicit, granting them adult qualities. The john is “just a guy doing what guys do,” said Lloyd, who wrote “Girls Like Us,” a memoir of her life as an exploited teen, and helped make a documentary, “Very Young Girls,” about exploited girls.

Linda Smith, the founder of Shared Hope International, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on preventing sex trafficking, said almost all states have laws against child molestation. But, she added, “if you add money to that — if a man goes to a truck stop, has a girl delivered, as long as he paid for her, he would be considered a john,” as opposed to a child molester.

She has focused on combating the trafficking of minors for sex for about a decade. Shared Hope keeps track of bills aimed at fighting sex trafficking of children and produces reports on how states perform in protecting minors and going after johns.

A former lawmaker — she represented Washington’s 3rd Congressional District from 1995 to 1999 — Smith developed the Demanding Justice Project, which puts the focus on johns and demand.

A recent fact sheet produced by Demanding Justice followed 134 cases of men busted for buying sex from minors. Of those, 119 were arrested and 113 were found guilty, with 26 percent of them serving no time and 69 percent of the others’ sentences being suspended.

“What we’re seeing is that as law enforcement gets who that little girl is, they start treating her as victim of a violent crime … They’re going out and arresting the buyers and retrieving the girls,” said Smith.

This is her at her most measured, unlike the time she appeared on Dr. Phil’s TV show in 2008 and suggested that the system make examples of johns, saying, “You hang just a few guys … and the rest will be like the crows that won’t go over the corn when they see a few dead ones hanging.”

“I said that, didn’t I?” she said, laughing. “Well, I meant it.”

Describing the girl as someone who was engaging in prostitution rather than a victim of trafficking doesn’t surprise Rachel Lloyd, the founder of GEMS, a New York–based educational and mentoring service targeting girls and young women who have been trafficked for sex.

The standard viewpoint, she said, is “Teen hooker arrested!”

But with the FBI setting the pace for how trafficked minors should be seen — as vulnerable victims in need of services and not as criminals — things are starting to change, slowly, in local jurisdictions.

Sgt. Daniel J. Steele, a member of the FBI Innocence Lost Task Force in Denver for almost four years, said he has seen a “dramatic shift” in how minor victims of human trafficking are now seen as people needing help, not merely accessories to “pimping cases.”

He said that in Denver, 60 percent of those arrested in prostitution busts are sellers and the remainder are buyers — which he said means johns aren’t getting arrested frequently enough.

That, he added, is a function of staffing, with seven investigators, including him, to handle domestic minor cases, with the vice squad being tied up with gangs, homicides and even protests.

Lina Nealon, the director of Boston-based Demand Abolition noted that nationally, it’s clear that sellers — including minors — “are being arrested at twice the rate of buyers.”

“If anything, that ratio should be should be flipped. If a vulnerable child is being bought five or 10 times a night, there should be five or 10 adults being arrested for every one person selling,” she said.

Seattle is among the cities that recently flipped those stats, because, said Val Richey, the deputy King County prosecutor, officials realized the numbers did not reflect the true nature of what was happening.

In 2009, King County arrested two men for soliciting sex from minors and 53 minors for prostitution. “When I looked at those numbers in 2009, it was pretty clear that we needed to change our tactics,” he said, adding that the focus switched from solicitation by minors to exploitation of those minors.

Source: Demanding Justice Project fact sheet. Graphic by Alex Newman/Al Jazeera America.

By 2014, the arrest numbers had been reversed: 52 johns arrested for trying to buy sex from a minor and one minor arrested for prostitution.

“The average age is 13 or 14 or 15. The problem in the past was that no one was taking the time to talk with these children,” said Richey. But finding police who are trained to deal with them isn’t easy.

Sgt. Brian Gallagher, who runs the South LA Human Trafficking Task Force, said that when he requested more officers to help with the enormous workload, he got 12 gang officers who weren’t trained in dealing with exploited minors.

But the somewhat silver lining is that gangs are connected to this trade more and more, so gang experience can be of use.

The largest annual sweep of trafficked minors and their pimps is the FBI’s Operation Cross Country, in which the feds link up with local law enforcement departments and go on dozens of busts. This year yielded 149 trafficked minors, the youngest 12 years old.

Michael Osborne, the chief of the FBI’s violent crimes against children unit, said the FBI created the national Innocence Lost initiative — with 71 child exploitation task forces that partner with more than 400 local, state and federal agencies — to fight child sex trafficking.

The focus of the work, he said, is “recovering young boys or girls that are being victimized. Period.” This means that prosecutions of pimps or johns can take a backseat. If they “identify a child that’s being trafficked, we shut the case down and pull the girl out.”

Osborne said that the FBI uses state and federal courts to go after pimps when possible but that “sometimes we forgo prosecutions to ensure that the children are pulled out and, obviously, not continuing to be victimized.”

He conceded that law enforcement has a way to go when it comes to how it looks at the girls — as victims, not as prostitutes. “We are, quite frankly, educating law enforcement and judges … [The minors] are not prostitutes. They’re victims. Children can’t consent in this situation,” he said.

While the minors are not arrested in the course of FBI stings, local authorities tend to handle things differently. Los Angeles County, for example stopped arresting sexually trafficked minors only in October.

Lisa Thurau — is the executive director of Strategies for Youth, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who trains police departments across the country — said the change is slow to come, if at all. “We’re not seeing those changes either. We’re not seeing that [police] are necessarily trained,” she said.

This, she said, is because there are financial constraints — training costs money — and because training on how to interact with youths is extremely sparse, with less than 1 percent of academy time is spent on it. And even that, she said, “has more to do with the law than with communication.”

Most officers, she said, have a hard time factoring in the notion of abuse when dealing with teens who act tough. “In certain taboo areas where you mix sex and violence, we find that officers have an even more difficult time recognizing that this is not a voluntary activity,” she said.

Compounding the issue is that there’s little in the way of statistics to show the rate at which minors are arrested on prostitution charges — or anything else, for that matter, because although states are supposed to keep track of juvenile arrests, that requirement is not enforced. (It’s much like the lack of data on disproportionate law enforcement contact with minorities.)

What happens when that information is not collected?

“Nothing,” said Thurau.

Local district attorneys, she said, are still prosecuting the girls, largely because there’s so little in place to deal with them otherwise. “What do you do with them … if there’s no other service to support this child and separate her from her pimp who is exploiting them and raping them?” she said.

“From behind her stepped out one of the young ladies who was still under the agency’s supervision … I was very glad to see her. She looked healthy,” said the judge. “She looked happy. She looked safe. And it is those brief, passing moments that make this type of persistent effort over years worth the time and energy.”

With 16 years of experience on the bench, Puig-Lugo is not representative of every judge in the system. As with any area, some laws and courts are more effective than others.

“Between 2002 to 2012, we went from zero to 50 states that have human trafficking laws. But they’re written in all kinds of different ways, and roughly half don’t have any sort of a safe harbor provision in them,” said Michael Shively, a senior associate with Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were he researches crime and justice.

“The laws are their own universe, and then there’s the practice, how the laws are implemented, and that’s another layer of complexity because something can appear on the books at a federal level … but end up being a paper tiger. Some laws might as well not actually exist, in terms of actually dealing with the problem,” he said.

And there are laws aplenty.

According to the Polaris Project, an anti-slavery nongovernmental organization, 37 states passed anti-trafficking laws of some description between August 2013 and July 2014. A ticker of laws being passed or killed can be found on Shared Hope International’s bill tracker.

What can make all the difference in terms of the law are cops and the courts. And a court is only as good as the judge presiding over it.

“Most judges look at those girls and say, ‘You’re prostituting yourself,’” said Christabelle, who was trafficked as a teen in the D.C. area. “And the pimps get away, and the girls are left with a mark on their record.”

Puig-Lugo noticed that trafficked girls arrive in his court in three contexts: via delinquency cases, as people in need of supervision and through the child welfare system, which handles abuse and neglect cases.

Up until a couple of years ago, he said, the majority of commercially sexually exploited children he saw were in the juvenile delinquency system, charged with solicitation and prostitution. That doesn’t happen anymore, he said, “because a decision was made to treat these youths as victims, not criminals … It’s been gradual. It hasn’t happened overnight.”

The chronic runaways, frequently people in need of supervision, he said, are the ones he mostly sees being sexually exploited.

Source: Demanding Justice Project fact sheet. Graphic by Alex Newman/Al Jazeera America.

In some states, such as California, the foster care system is seen as failing the children in its care, with Attorney General Kamala Harris targeting it as a pipeline for human trafficking. And in D.C., the executive director of Fair Girls said, 70 to 75 percent of the girls helped by the anti-trafficking organization were in the foster care system.

But Puig-Lugo isn’t so quick to blame any one agency for the exploited kids he sees in his courtroom.

“There is a problem with the statistics. I think at this point we can only make calculated estimates … We know that the problem exists. We see the children. We can’t cover up the sky and pretend that it doesn’t happen. But it’s not clear how widespread the problem it is,” he said.

“Maybe in some places the child welfare system does a play a role in how the kids end up in the system. Maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “But independently of how widespread or not it may be, it is our responsibility as society to support [those] who are identified [as trafficked] as best as we can, whether it’s one child or 100,000.”

In pointing this out, Puig-Lugo touched on yet another messy truth about the trafficking of minors for sex in the United States: The problem might look similar in different states, and maybe there are common denominators in how the minors end up being exploited.

He is not much for a piecemeal approach. He’s shooting for comprehensive.

He has called all the key players — such as NGOs (including FAIR Girls and Shared Hope International), court advocates, social workers, health care officials, mental health professionals, lawyers, teachers and other judges — for strategic planning sessions aimed at providing training and information across the board.

They are piloting a program that involves asking minors entering the system questions that are not directly related to sex trafficking but could raise flags that could trigger taking a closer look at certain children, improving the screening of youths for being commercially sexually exploited.

They’re also working on improving informal lines of communication and making them a matter of protocol. “Everybody across the system has to be equally aware about and sensitive to the situation,” he said. “What we see is pockets of initiative, pockets of awareness. We see a lot of enthusiasm for collaboration.”

“The challenge comes in coordinating that collaboration,” he said.

Because it’s tough to get a pimp on the record, Al Jazeera America interviewed Special Agent Renea Green of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Special Agent Evan Nicholas of the FBI’s crimes against children unit in New York to get an idea of who a pimp is and how he operates.

Both said that increasingly, pimps are coming into trafficking from gang backgrounds, most with criminal records. They find pimping girls very lucrative and less risky than running drugs.

“We’ve had traffickers tell us, ‘Hey it’s a lot easier for me to explain why I’ve got this girl sitting in this seat next to me than why I have a kilo of cocaine sitting in the seat next to me,’” said Green.

Besides, finding a girl to sell is easier than moving contraband.

“It’s easier in a lot of ways than selling drugs and guns, because it’s easy to lose a girl. You can just get another girl,” said Nicholas.

Plus, he said, pimps make a lot of quick money.

A mask-wearing anonymous New York–based pimp, identified as Hef, told National Geographic that the goal for each girl was to make “a stack a day,” or $1,000.

“You got five [girls] making a stack a day, that’s $5,000 a day,” he said. “You work maybe six days a week, take a day off to chill. Five times six: 30. Thirty times four weeks is a $120,000 a month. That’s what you want.”

Being forced to have sex with at least 10 men each day, depending on the rate set by the pimp, takes a severe toll on most girls. In order to keep them functioning, Green said, most pimps have some drugs on them, perhaps some Ecstasy or marijuana.

Most want girls to stay away from hard drugs, not out of concern for a girl’s health but “because when the girls get addicted to drugs, they become hard to control,” she said.

”And for pimps, it’s all about control,” she said — down to having his street name tattooed or branded onto a girl, sometimes under a crown as a reminder of who “owns” her.