Sadly, these girls are among the estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children who are sold for sex by pimp-captors every year in the United States, according to the Department of Justice. And, astonishingly, the average age of a prostituted girl in the US is 12-14 years.

Suspend disbelief for just a moment while you imagine your seventh grade child, niece or sister, sold for sex. If you live in a city, imagine that happening within one square mile from where you are right now. New York, Ohio, Georgia, Oregon and California have among the highest rates of trafficked teens.

Young girls are the new commodities that traffickers and gangs are selling. As incomprehensible as it seems, today trafficking in girls brings in more profits and spells less prison time than dealing crack. The U.S. government annually spends 300 times more money to fight drug trafficking than it does to fight human trafficking. The criminal penalties for trafficking cocaine, for example, are 20 times greater than the criminal penalties levied against those who buy and sell girls.

The girls, many of whom have run away from abusive family situations or foster care placements, are lured, tricked, or coerced by pimps, who often promise them love and safety. And sometimes, these are girls who are just snatched off the streets by the pimps, leaving heart-broken parents to search through the Internet and walk the “tracks” to find their daughters. Like sexually exploited and trafficked girls in Thailand or India, prostituted girls in the U.S. are routinely raped, beaten into submission, and even tattooed like cattle by their pimps.

Which gets us back to craigslist. If you want to know the greatest connector of those children to, by some estimates, thousands of “johns” in America, look no further than the best-known online trading post: craigslist. While most people use the site to buy and sell stuff-- cars, clothes and musical instruments-- the most active areas of the site were used to buy sex, often with very young girls. Law enforcement across the U.S. identified craigslist as the number one platform for the buying and selling of sex with children and young women.

According to a brief filed by Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart in his legal action against craigslist, an FBI investigation found that more than 2,800 child prostitution ads were posted on craigslist in 2008 alone.

That’s why it was so critical to take down what became the “Walmart” of child prostitution and sex trafficking on line. It is now less convenient, easy, and normative to sell girls on line.

We can obfuscate the dirty little secret in America that girls are being sold for sex on a legitimate website like craigslist, and on streets. We can make ourselves feel comfortable by talking about the girls who are prostituted in India and Thailand as victims of sex trafficking, but cast aside the girls sold off of craigslist as “hookers” or just bad girls. We can neatly gloss over the ugly business of commercial sexual exploitation that disfigures the lives of poor and undereducated girls, who are usually Black or Brown, as just being about escort services, or the choice work of some sexually free-thinking graduate students. And we can talk about the first amendment rather than the human rights issue of American children being bought and sold for sex.

Or, we can start asking the very difficult question of why in 21st century America, any girl is for sale?

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