Girls 4 Sale For most businesses in the U. The sex industry is no exception. Now sex is as easy to find online as shelter puppies, used cars, and apartment rentals. But there's an ugly truth about this booming business: An untold number of underage girls are sold for sex online every day. Meet two women determined to get them out. IT'S LATE ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN THE FASHIONABLE WASHINGTON, D. Her work for the night is just getting started. With her long blonde hair pulled back with a plastic claw clip, Powell clicks over to a website she spends more hours on every week than her own Facebook page. It's a shopping site — but she's not looking for her trademark platform sandals here. The site is , the nation's largest online marketplace for sex according to independent industry analyses, and Powell, the executive director of FAIR Girls, a small nonprofit that helps underage girls escape prostitution, hasn't come to shop. On Backpage, Friday afternoon is like a flash sale for sex — it's payday and the start of the weekend, when demand for prostitution is high and prices are cheap. Suggestively posing for photos in skimpy lingerie, typically in hotel rooms or bedrooms, the girls come in all sizes and races. What worries Powell — why she scours Backpage's ads even late at night while her husband sleeps — is that these girls come in all ages, too. Some are literally girls: minors bought and sold in the increasingly online, on-demand big business of commercial sex. In the past several years, Powell has met hundreds of underage girls who have been sold on Backpage and other sex sites. At FAIR Girls' D. Powell will snap into action, counseling traumatized girls right off the street, finding them shelter, and sometimes reconnecting them with their families. As online prostitution becomes increasingly common, Powell does her own detective work on Backpage, searching the ads for minors. But figuring out which escorts are underage isn't easy. A 15-year-old may be listed as 19. Appearances can be altered with wigs and makeup, making a young girl look older. For help, Powell enlists one of her trusted employees, Alissa not her real name , a 24-year-old who herself once posed in ads like these when she was a teen. A poised, striking African-American woman dressed in conservative black pants and flats, Alissa — who works part-time at FAIR Girls, counseling girls who escape from prostitution, while also going to college part-time and hostessing at a restaurant — seems like a typical young professional. From their cramped office with bent blinds — the location of which is kept secret to protect former prostitutes from their violent pimps — Powell and Alissa scour the ads, looking for girls who bear the trademarks of adolescence, such as teen acne, baby fat, or barely developed curves. When they see a suspicious ad, Powell flags it for the local police officers she regularly works with, hoping they'll set up a sting with a male officer posing as a john. She reports about four ads each week. She also sends suspicious ads to Backpage's administrative offices but says she rarely gets a response. Suddenly, Powell clicks on an ad that makes her wince. Well I'm a huge freak. Slender and baby-faced, she poses on her knees on a hotel bed in a black leotard she fills out no better than an Olympic gymnast, staring expressionless at the camera through heavy bangs. Even to Powell and Alissa, who have seen many gratuitous photos on Backpage a girl standing in front of school lockers, another with a pacifier in her mouth , this escort seems blatantly young. Since then, like much else in America, the sex trade has been hugely affected by the Web. Now, more sex is being sold online on thousands of different websites, from explicit sex sites to mainstream social networks just search escorts on LinkedIn. While prostitution is illegal, with the exception of a few Nevada counties, hosting online sex ads is not, thanks to section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which protects Web companies against liability for what users post on their sites, helping online prostitution flourish in recent years. No site symbolizes the new business model for prostitution as well as Backpage, the Web classifieds service owned by Phoenix-based Village Voice Media, which also runs 13 alternative newsweeklies, including the venerable Village Voice in New York City. According to the research group AIM, of the five major sites it reviewed, Backpage accounts for 70 percent of prostitution advertising; the site hosts an estimated 20,000 sex ads nationwide daily. It's also the most mainstream: This isn't some seedy, underground sex forum. It's the same place where Americans sell used cars, adopt shelter puppies, and find part-time jobs. That success has made Backpage the industry leader in online prostitution — but it's also designated the site public enemy No. For as mainstream as Backpage appears, hovering just below that sheen of normalcy is the dark, seamy underbelly of the sex trade. As with any illegal enterprise, the prostitution business is rife with corruption, abuse, and exploitation. For every consenting adult engaged in prostitution, there is an untold number of minors some experts estimate 100,000 , many forced or coerced into the work by pimps. Experts say these kids have been ensnared in a form of organized crime. But instead of trafficking guns or drugs, pimps buy and sell bodies, which are cheaper and can be sold over and over again — an ideal commodity. Teenage girls are easy targets because they're more emotionally vulnerable than adults. The easiest targets of all: teen runaways or girls from broken or abusive homes, who can easily disappear unnoticed into the underworld of prostitution. And they're doing so despite Village Voice Media's attempts to stop them. First, an automated filter searches for suspect phrases much like those Powell and Alissa search for , then Backpage employees manually screen ads before and after they are posted. As a result, Backpage reports about 400 suspicious ads each month to the NCMEC hotline for missing and exploited children; it also cooperates with subpoenas from law enforcement. It's impossible to screen your way out of this problem. In late May, federal authorities broke up a nationwide ring that allegedly used the site to sell teenage girls. According to the indictment, the ringleader deterred them from escaping by whipping them with a belt, choking them, and threatening to kill their families. McKenna is one of 51 attorneys general — along with scores of advocates including Powell and about 250,000 others who signed a petition on Change. In 2010, online classifieds giant Craigslist closed its escort category under similar pressure. At 16, she was a high school junior in inner-city Boston. Her mother was a recovering drug addict who couldn't care for her; her father was an alcoholic who wouldn't pay the bills. Alissa ended up on the streets. But she found a lifeline — a group of older girls from her neighborhood who had their own apartment and invited her to stay with them. Soon, Alissa discovered where they made their money: in suburban hotels having sex with numerous men every night. Within weeks, Alissa decided to give sex work a try, too. She was surprised to see so many girls she knew there. Almost immediately, noticing the new girl, pimps started harassing Alissa to work for them. In exchange for taking most of Alissa's earnings, a pimp would provide her protection from violent johns and bail her out of jail if she needed it. Without a pimp, Alissa would be on her own. At first, she chose a friend's pimp, who seemed to treat his girls well, until one freezing December night when he left her walking the streets in heavy snow until 4:30 a. Another pimp saw her alone, shivering in the cold, and picked her up — an older, charismatic guy who flirted, told her she was being mistreated, and said exactly what she needed to hear. Eventually, Alissa spent less time on the streets and started getting more and more work online, which meant staying in hotels waiting for dates. After long, Red Bull- and booze-fueled nights of having sex with john after john, Alissa slept in hotels with her pimp and wife-in-laws. On another occasion, he carved her face with a potato peeler. The abuse took its toll on Alissa. That's about the price of condoms. I didn't think I was worth a pack of Magnums. Just like with food — you want Chinese one day, Cajun another day. For them, it's just like that buying a girl. But she learned just how hard it was to get out. Within weeks, four women — one of whom had the pimp's name tattooed on her neck — jumped her, kicking and stomping on her face, legs, and stomach, causing her to miscarry. Alissa ran five blocks to a police station, where officers took her to the hospital and called the FBI. Although she feared that talking would put her in danger, she wanted the world to know what her pimps had done. After going to authorities, she was placed in foster care, first in Massachusetts, then in North Carolina with a foster mother who Alissa says was abusive and would give her only one meal a day. The neglect and isolation made her so despondent that she ran away, leaving on a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, where she knew exactly how she'd survive — the familiar track, pimps, hotels, and websites where she could post her ads. She stayed in the life for another year and a half. That whole time, she remained in contact with an FBI agent, the lead investigator in the case against Alissa's pimps, who eventually convinced her to leave the life for good. Then, when her pimps went to trial in 2009, she moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, for her own protection through federal witness relocation. She got an apartment and enrolled in school. And eventually, Andrea Powell came calling. This past January, after Powell saw an interview Alissa gave to a Knoxville reporter about her experience, she went to Tennessee to meet her. Within two days, Powell offered Alissa a job — to come to Washington, D. As she's unspooling even the most horrific parts of her story, her piercing eyes are unwavering. When she describes a beating from a former pimp, she nonchalantly raises her shirt to show a jagged scar. But while she'll tell you almost anything that happened to her if it will help raise awareness of what's happening to other girls, she occasionally loses her patience. When asked how many men she was forced to sleep with in one night, after she had offered numerous other details of her ordeal in prostitution, she makes clear that the question is out of bounds. When she walks down city streets, she says, pimps notice her. And yet, Alissa is clearly attached to Powell, seeing her as an older sister and role model. At 17, Powell left her sleepy hometown of San Marco, Texas, to study abroad in Hanover, Germany. There, she befriended Rafif, a 19-year-old girl originally from Syria whose family had sold her to a man three times her age as a form of debt payment. Rafif became the man's fourth and youngest wife and was forced to work as a domestic servant in his home, where she was beaten by the other wives. Together, the girls plotted Rafif's escape — she'd go back to Texas with Powell. But they never had the chance to execute their plan. One day, Rafif vanished. Police said there was no record that the girl even existed since she had been brought to Germany illegally. With no paper trail and no witnesses, nothing could be done. Powell and Alissa frequently buy the girls lunch or Metro cards with their own money and spend some nights talking on the phone to girls who can't sleep because they're still afraid of their pimps. As of June, FAIR Girls had 55 clients, more than double the amount last year. In recent months, teen girls who have escaped their pimps have come from as far away as Washington state, Iowa, and Vermont for help. It took three days, but Washington, D. After getting the tip from Powell, police set up a sting and confronted the girl in the hotel room where she was meeting johns. But the girl said she was in fact an adult — and didn't want help from the police or anyone else. Within a day, Powell found her posted on Backpage again with different photos. Within hours, another girl arrived. By Monday morning, there were two more girls — all had been advertised on Backpage. That's about the price of condoms. I thought I wasn't worth a pack of Magnums.
