Title: Sex Trafficking in the United States - The Atlantic
Headings: When Sex Trafficking Goes Unnoticed in America
Politics
When Sex Trafficking Goes Unnoticed in America
Many cases go unreported, making it a difficult crime for law enforcement personnel to spot.
Read Follow-Up Notes

Content: Recommended Reading
Don’t Sleep on Asian American Voters
Ronald Brownstein
What Bosses Really Think of Remote Workers
Olga Khazan
The Inside Story of Joe Biden’s Most Fateful Decision
Edward-Isaac Dovere
It’s a vicious cycle that law enforcement in the U.S. sees time and time again. Women can be pulled in to commercial sex through gangs or pimps—the former function as delivery services, taking women to houses in the area they control, while the latter focus on hotels and street level prostitution, according to Woolf. “ In gang-controlled situations, it’s usually going to be that the girl is from the area. When it’s a pimp … it’ll probably be girls from all over the place,” he said. A woman, who I met through the Thomson Reuters Foundation and who asked that I not use her name to ensure her safety, was pulled in by a pimp when she was 17 years old. Before then, her life was fairly ordinary. She had a good upbringing—a closely knit family and comfortable home. But in high school, she learned that her mother had been embezzling money from her company, and would be sentenced to seven years in prison. That changed everything. After her mother was gone, she acted out and her relationship with her father fell apart, she told me.