(Jacobin) — In the longest summer of my youth, I found myself in the passenger seat of a shoddy car with a stranger to the left of me, a stranger I would have to put all of my trust in. He drove us up and down Los Angeles’s Crenshaw Boulevard, waiting for a prepaid phone to ring. The men calling would ask for “the Asian one.”
Upon meeting, I would be paid $300, do my job, and walk away with 50 percent.
Over the following years I would go through the same routine in a number of cities. Sometimes I worked with a partner and sometimes I worked independently. Legally, I was engaged in sex trafficking. But for me, it was just work.
Recently, the cases of missing young girls in Washington DC went viral, driven by unsubstantiated claims that they were victims of trafficking. This kind of misinformation, while common, stems from a simplistic understanding of the sex industry that does little to help actual trafficking victims while buoying high-profile NGOs with a savior complex.
