The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Battle continues against sex traffickin­g of minors in U.S.

- George F. Will

grandmothe­r, who immediatel­y told him the girl might have been in prostituti­on since she was 15. Trained in interview techniques for such situations, and experience­d at noticing people who somehow do not belong together, Otto correctly suspected DMST — domestic minor sex traffickin­g.

Trooper Mitch Jergenson, 46, stopped a car driven by a man whose passenger was a 17-yearold girl he had gotten to know via Facebook and other social media. He had paid for her ticket from California to Phoenix and was taking her to Las Vegas. She said she was going to be a “model,” then said she was going to work in a strip club. This, says Jergenson, is “the start of a process” whereby minors often wind up working the streets.

Sgt. Scott Reutter, 47, who watches the motels near the Phoenix intersecti­on of I-17 and I-10, where prostitute­s are active, approached a young girl talking to an older man. She said she was 22. Reutter, whose daughters are 22 and 19, thought she was “14, maybe 15.” She had been a runaway for 17 months, since she was 13, and said that if she were returned to the custody of child services she would run again. After a 10-minute hearing, she was returned. She immediatel­y ran, and did so repeatedly. To be in law enforcemen­t is often to feel condemned to bailing an ocean with a thimble.

Frank Milstead, too, knows how Sisyphus felt. When nature designed him, it had a director of the Department of Public Safety in mind. Large and laconic, he is the 54-yearold son of a Phoenix cop and he knows in the marrow of his bones that “there are so many people out there who want to take advantage of other people.”

It is unclear how many victims of DMST there are because for many reasons the crime is not often reported by its victims. They are, Milstead says, usually abducted, sort of, from “some environmen­t where nobody missed them,” adding, however, that trafficker­s cannot control “people who are unwilling.”

The website Backpage, whose founders live in Arizona, began as a place for normal classified advertisin­g but, a U.S. Senate investigat­ion concluded, found its most lucrative business being a sexual marketplac­e. The New York Times reports that law enforcemen­t officials say Backpage’s “dating section” often “used teasers like ‘Amber alert’ and ‘Lolita’ to signal that children were for sale.”

Holding up his smartphone, Milstead, whose vocation reinforces his inclinatio­n to look on the dark side, says: “Leaving your kid alone at night in his room with this? You might as well leave him or her in the city park downtown. Anything is available on a phone.”

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