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When a man promised to love and take care of ten-year-old Withelma "T" Ortiz Walker Pettigrew, she thought her luck had finally changed. Born to drug-addicted parents, T spent her life bouncing in and out of foster care. In ten short years, she lived through 14 placements; several unsuccessful returns home; and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Foster care, the very institution meant to protect her, instead made her more vulnerable. In care, she learned to accept being controlled and normalized the idea of adults using her for financial gain. When she was offered the love, support, and attachment she craved, she jumped at the opportunity.
Instead, the man who promised to love her began selling her ten-year-old body to be raped. For eight years, all across the western United States, he beat her and sold her on the streets, in massage parlors, and in the back pages of newspapers. She was arrested multiple times for solicitation and prostitution but always returned to her trafficker. Having escaped trafficking at 17, T is a powerful advocate for youth victims of trafficking, testifying before Congress and appearing in TIME's "100 Most Influential People." Many of her friends weren't so lucky, serving lifetimes in prison or being beaten so badly that their bodies could only be identified by the tattoos that branded them as property of their pimps.1,2
T's story is too common. While awareness of sex trafficking in the United States is rising, it is still largely viewed as a problem in other countries-not our problem. On the contrary, experts estimate that the United States is the world's second-largest sex-trafficking market. A staggering 40 percent of these cases involve domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST).
DMST refers to the commercial sexual exploitation of a minor, in their own country, to perform sexual acts in exchange for money or other items of value.3 For children in the United States, this exploitation takes a variety of forms: sex slavery; pimp-controlled sex; youth-initiated trafficking; child pornography; and survival sex, in which youth exchange sex to meet basic needs, like food or shelter.4 Calculating precise victimization rates is difficult because buying and selling the bodies of children is a necessarily secretive act, and victims are often too psychologically broken and ashamed to...