Blade in America

“Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie. She surveyed the intersection in South Central Los Angeles, where preteens were hobbling in stilettos and G-strings. It was a Tuesday night this January, and Ana knew that most of the girls longed for a coat or gloves — anything to keep them warm — but covering up was not an option. Their eyes were cast down, but their hands waved mechanically at every car, angling for another customer to help meet their traffickers’ quotas.” Some excellent reporting by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn in the NYT Magazine (Gift Article): Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street? “Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.” It makes you wonder. In a era when were spending so many resources fighting the hyped-up threat of an imaginary invasion, what if we put the same kind of effort into solving real, long term problems?