Angelique was taken to highways, motels, and truck stops and sold ten to fifteen times a day. After a severe beating, she remembered a local nurse had given her a phone number to call if she ever wanted to leave. After coming to her senses, she called the nurse, and she drove her five hours to a rehab clinic to help her begin to heal her addiction to heroin and alcohol. After being in detox and finding Jesus, she shares her story with survivors just like her and speaks to many crowds across the country (NBC News). Angeliques story is one of millions of other women and girls across the United States. The issue is spreading rapidly throughout the country, and it is eighty- percent of what human trafficking constitutes. Sex trafficking is a problem in the United States because of the easy money that is earned, the manipulation of women and girls, and how the industry is concealed.
According to Polaris, a sex trafficking awareness website, there have been thirty-four thousand, eight hundred cases of sex trafficking in the United States since 2007. (Polaris Project) Sex trafficking is a problem in the United States because of the easy profits that can be e made by exploiting young women and girls. In the sex trafficking business, girls come with a price. Prices can vary from pimp to pimp, but prices can usually go from fifty to three hundred dollars an hour. Accord
ing to a source, one pimp had three girls bringing him back five hundred dollars each, a day. (Frundt) And all this money adds up, and the result is scary. The International Labor Organization, or ILO, estimates that human trafficking, which includes sex trafficking, generates an estimated one hundred fifty billion dollars per year, illegally. (Collins) It is also popular because the profits are more promising than drug or weapon trafficking. Vanity Fair states that You can sell a pound of heroin or an AK-47 once, but you can sell a young girl multiple times a day. (Collins) Money is a major factor in the sex trafficking world, and it can make or break a trafficked girl. If the girls do not meet the quota set by their pimp, they can face punishments ranging from forced sexual intercourse to actual beatings, and like Angelique, even threatened to death. To avoid this, some girls stay out longer than they are allotted to get the profit they need to make their pimp happy and satisfied. They also must obey any rule the pimp gives them. One girl recalls that they had to avoid any type of law enforcement-he said we couldnt risk getting caught. (Archer) If girls disobey their pimp, it could result in severe repercussions, from no food for a week to isolation. These punishments can damage the girls mentally, and for some, send them into a downward spiral into oblivion.