Friday, January 22, 2016

SEX TRAFFICKING- HOW IT HAPPENS

Two vice squad officers with the Los Angeles Police Department take information from a hand-cuffed woman January 31, 2013 before she's brought to South Central's 77th Street Division station on a charge of prostitution in Los Angeles, California. While the charge of soliciting or loitering with the intent to commit prostitution is a misdemeanor, the woman will be held for 2-4 days until she's formally charged. In South Central Los Angeles, prostitution is rampant and often controlled by pimps who are former Bloods or Crips gang members.


The Sex-Trafficking Victim Next Door


When Annika was 13, she was snatched off the streets of Atlanta and forced into prostitution, one more victim in America’s ‘capital of sex trafficking.’

ATLANTA—“I got snatched two days after I turnt 13,” she says. “I guess I got numb, ’cause I couldn’t feel nothing no more.”
Annika sucks on the butt of a Newport, lets the smoke fill her chest and then exhales a perfect stream from her nostrils. “You ain’t gotta say it,” she tells me. “I smoke like a man.”
She’s 17 now, the mother of an 8-month-old baby boy, and she has the demeanor of a woman twice her age. I watch her carefully—taking in the hard lines in her face, the pockmark scars running up her frail arms and the deep, serious brown eyes—wondering how much of the truth she’s finally willing to tell me.
“My mama watch him for me when she get off work at night,” she says of the baby sleeping in the next room, as she extinguishes the cigarette. “I guess I shouldn’t be smoking.”
“It happened fast,” she explains. Annika cut class and left school early that day, she admits. “I was talking to this white girl up at the MARTA station and she tells me her dude coming to pick her up and that they going to Lenox.”
When the little silver BMW showed up, the “white girl” went to talk to the driver, then offered Annika a ride home. “He was real chill,” she said.
In the back seat, Amy the “white girl” poured some Red Bull and vodka into two Styrofoam cups. Annika took a sip and immediately felt dizzy. “I’ont remember nothing after that. I blacked out.”
She never made it home.
Hours later, Annika woke up naked in a motel room somewhere in Tennessee. “Prince” was hovered over her face, stroking her hair. She felt a throbbing between her legs. Her back was hurting.
“You’re mine now,” he told her.
Sex trafficking is the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, second only to the drug trade, and according to the FBI, Atlanta remains one of the largest sex traffickinghubs in the country. Young boys and girls are bought and sold there in the name of big profit, with some pimps reportedly raking in $33,000 a week.
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