It’s known as the Blade, a section of Los Angeles that’s become one of the country’s most notorious child sex trafficking corridors. Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, a national health reporter for The New York Times, spent nearly a year interviewing victims, experts, aid workers and officials. She writes about her experience trying to understand the crisis.
Life on the Blade
The scene seemed exceedingly normal — a classic Los Angeles traffic jam. I might have considered it merely routine if not for the clock on my dashboard and the lives at stake. It was almost 4 a.m., and I was inching down Figueroa Street in South Central Los Angeles. This neighborhood had no bars, no movie theaters, no street carts still open. Every car for over a mile was here for the same disturbing commodity. This 50-block stretch, called the Blade, is home to one of the most notorious child sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. Here, girls — some of them 11 or 12 years old — go from car to car, soliciting customers for sex in order to reach their traffickers’ nightly quotas. I have spent much of the past year reporting on Figueroa. Many of the street’s scenes and rhythms, like its early morning traffic jams, have inevitably begun to feel normal. The Hello Kitty purses paired with stilettos. The tattoos on the faces of the girls, denoting a trafficker’s claim. The toddlers in the laundromats in the afternoons, their faces pressed up to the windows to watch girls in glitter strut past. For law enforcement officers, too, it was all business as usual. A sergeant who had worked the precinct for two decades told me where I would find his concealed handgun, should a trafficker kill him while we were out on an operation to remove underage girls from the Blade. Then he sighed and put that behind him. “So,” he asked, quickly making small talk, “do you have any cats?”
At some point, I began wondering whether the Blade had become normal to community members as well. I asked the school principal who sometimes found sex toys on the playground, tossed from a motel next door; the young family with a special “condom broom” they pulled out to sweep the driveway whenever they were expecting company; the pastor who fed many of the girls at church potlucks and who once noticed them lingering outside the church doors on Ash Wednesday. “I explained the ashes and asked if they would like to receive them,” the pastor told me. “Two of them said yes. I never saw them again.” Sometimes, a crisis carries on for so long that it no longer seems like a crisis. That’s how it felt on Figueroa Street. And yet, the people who lived there each felt they had a job to do. That principal successfully campaigned to have the problematic motel shut down. That family took part in a community march to draw the attention of city officials. That pastor chased down traffickers who tried to recruit girls from his pews. Most of us have the luxury of being horrified the first time we hear about a depravity, bothered the second, and exhausted the third. Not so for the people living it. They fight on. Other California news
Look up the heat index in your area using The Times’s heat tracker. See active fires using The Times’s wildfire tracker.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
