The difficult realization at the core of our services for minor victims of trafficking is the acknowledgement that however nefarious and immoral the actions of traffickers may be, they are successful at meeting the needs of youth through their own manipulative and exploitive means. The only way we can compete with them is to demonstrate to victims, from the very first encounter, that we can help them in a compassionate and therapeutic manner.

Almost anyone who knows someone in middle or high school sees signs of the stress that is part of adolescence; I’ve talked with young people who cut, whose hair fell out in patches. But in these pandemic months, our stress has been as self-contained as everything else

About 10 years ago, we started hearing from our direct-service colleagues that the girls in their programs were facing new pressures to look and act in sexual ways. While children in state care had always been at higher risk of sexual abuse than other kids, with all the attending behavioral fallout, it seemed like something new was happening. Something in the culture, perhaps.

One look at her page and I could see that Savannah wasn’t a pudgy 10-year-old in pigtails any more. She was a pretty, if somewhat hard-looking, teenager. But I could still see the little girl underneath.

It’s easy for adults like me to be outraged and wounded in advance for little girls like the one I’m describing, who after all are learning at such a tender age to value themselves only through the appraising eyes of their peers and and the frankly predatory older boys who seem to beckon them ever closer