Nicholas Kristof
Kanisha Hamilton became an expert on sex trafficking in the most unfortunate way, beginning at age 12. So whenever she heard talk about the Jeffrey Epstein case, “it triggered me bad,” she recalled.
“I would wake up in the mornings and think about something that had to do with it, and just start crying uncontrollably,” she said. “Because I knew there are thousands, if not more, women, children and even men suffering at that moment. And everyone else in the world is just going about their business acting like they can’t do anything.
“That’s how people like that get away with sex trafficking people,” she said.
One of the paradoxes of the moment is that there is intense outrage at Epstein and his enablers but almost no effort to protect the girls or boys who continue to be trafficked around the country and the world. We are rightly appalled at the general indifference that powerful figures showed toward Epstein’s assaults, yet collectively we show a parallel indifference to the predation that continues to unfold in cheap motels everywhere. The upshot is that exploitation of girls and boys continues daily at thousands of times the scale of anything Epstein did.
Hamilton’s pathway began when she was around 6 months old and her mother, who was addicted to drugs, was killed, she said. Her grandmother then traded her to a child molester for heroin, she said, and after enduring abuse she ended up in the dysfunctional world of foster care. At 12, she joined her dad, a pimp who began selling her as well as the other women he controlled, she added.
We sometimes imagine that traffickers jump out of bushes, grab teenage girls and drag them into vans, to be chained to radiators. But I’ve been writing about trafficking for more than 25 years, and mostly the traffickers prey on girls who are already vulnerable. In need of housing, food or love, these girls are too often invisible to society — but not to pimps.
“There’s just an overall misconception of what trafficking is, what it looks like,” said Felicia Bowman, who was trafficked at age 7 by a friend’s brother who was also a drug dealer. “People think that it’s a white van, it’s the zip ties on your car at Target.” She was referring to an urban legend that traffickers drive white commercial vans to kidnap girls, and mark kidnapping targets with zip ties.
“How do we hold the fact that it’s all these vulnerabilities that we’re not addressing?” she added. “Because then we’re all accountable, and we’re all responsible, and a lot of the problems that lead to that are so big.”
Bowman had those vulnerabilities. A female family friend who watched over her took advantage of them and sold her for sex, she said. “She was making me sleep with people for money for drugs,” Bowman recalled.
It’s not just that we don’t try to help these children. Often, we scorn them. We see them as bad kids, as troublemakers, as runaways, and we are lenient to those who abuse them.
Bowman says that when she was 12, a man was arrested for sexually assaulting her. “He was found guilty,” she said. “He got 30 days.” Records document that.
I asked her if any mandatory reporters had seen evidence of her abuse and reported it to authorities. On the contrary, she said, authorities who should have been looking out for her also abused her. One was caught and convicted, but his only punishment was house arrest.
It’s no wonder that Bowman didn’t trust authority figures. All they did was exploit her.
I met Bowman and Hamilton through an impressive nonprofit called Dragonfly that serves trafficking survivors in Oklahoma. These local initiatives, offering everything from therapy to medical care to removal of pimp tattoos, are invaluable — but they are starved of resources. When a girl leaves a pimp, it can be a scramble to find a bed for her.
When help comes, it can be transformative. Hamilton and Bowman are now thriving and helping other survivors of human trafficking.
“We’re underfunded, and the demand is insane for our services,” said Whitney Anderson, a founder of Dragonfly. “What keeps us going is that these are individuals who have survived the worst of the worst. That they have seen things done to them that humans should never do, and they are in front of us. And so we owe them the very best.”
If we were serious about confronting trafficking, we could boost support for these programs around the country. We could shut down websites where pimps advertise girls (and sometimes boys), as prosecutors did with Backpage, which once dominated the field. We could insist that social media platforms crack down on traffickers who recruit on their pages using coded language. We could make much greater efforts to prosecute pimps. Most of all, we could do more to help families and children so that they’re not in the pipeline to be trafficked.
Yet instead of helping these vulnerable children, we’re magnifying the risks. President Trump’s cuts in social services, such as for mental health and addiction treatment, may lead to more disadvantaged and chaotic homes and more trafficked children. If we truly think that Epstein was a monster, then what’s needed isn’t shaking our fists at his corpse. It’s a real effort to help the girls and boys who, in cities around the country, are struggling in chaotic homes, desperate for help and not getting any at all.