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Oakland Local, a web site run by BlogHer Contributing Editor Susan Mernit, is running an original investigative series on youth sex trafficking in the Bay area. This story is reposted from that series at Oakland Local.
It's nearly midnight on a Thursday and teen-age girls are on every corner of International Boulevard in the dozen blocks stretching south from 41st Street. Many are dressed up. But this is not prom night or a concert letting out.
Some have bruises on their bodies; some are pregnant. Not far from any one of them is a sex trafficker who stands to make $500 a night from each girl he or she controls. Recruited with promises of love, or sometimes simply kidnapped, the girls are then put out on the streets.
These girls are commodities in a slave trade that is rampant in Oakland and similar cities across America, law enforcement and social workers say -- one that's growing with the recession. It's a trade in which adolescents peddle their flesh to make money for pimps in exchange for food, shelter and affection. Some are held against their will and continue the work to avoid getting beat up or tortured.
"They have quotas. If they don't come back with (the) quota, they stay out or get beaten," said investigator Jim Saleda, of the Oakland Police Department's Child Exploitation Unit, as he drove along International one night in an effort to rescue some girls and arrest pimps.
"Typically it's about $500," he said shaking his head. "Ten tricks," he said. Ten encounters with strangers.
"This Is Modern Day Slavery"
Trafficking children for commercial sex has become big business in Oakland and across America, rivaling only the weapons and narcotics trades in size, according to the U.S. State Department. A pimp who controls four girls -- which is not unusual -- can bring in close to $2,000 a night or an average take of $632,000 a year, according to a study out of Washington, DC, by the Polaris Project. Such easy money is making this the fastest growing criminal industry in America.
"When people think of human trafficking they think of shipping containers and Asia. But it's happening right here in our backyard with girls from Oakland and the East Bay," said Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock, who created and heads the Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit at the DA's office.
"This is modern day slavery," she said. "We think we ended slavery in this country 150 years ago. Well it's all over the streets of America. And it's turning into a crisis."
As the Great Recession continues, more kids are landing on the streets, leaving, or being pushed out from, families in financial stress or group homes that closed during the recession. Once on the street, they are vulnerable to being recruited into prostitution. In fact, most runaways will be approached by a sex trafficker within 48 hours, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Some youth start trading sex for food or a couch to sleep on, and then find they’re ordered to turn tricks to please the person providing them sustenance. Some are lured by seeming friendship by a pimp posing as a boyfriend. Still others are brought into this business violently: raped or kidnapped and forced to turn tricks under threat of gunpoint or physical harm. Being trafficked means they must hand over the money they make turning tricks to receive the shelter, food or clothing that a person too young to get a job cannot procure for themselves.
"It's a way to survive," said one girl who admitted she was working the streets on San Pablo Avenue one Saturday night. It wasn't her idea to make money this way: she got into commercial sex "through someone I thought was my boyfriend" but turned out to be a pimp, she said. Then she continued, not knowing what else to do. "It's been about a year" she started to say -- before walking off to meet a blue sedan that had slowed down in front of her, turned the
