It’s a vicious cycle that law enforcement in the U.S. sees time and time again. Women can be pulled in to commercial sex through gangs or pimps—the former function as delivery services, taking women to houses in the area they control, while the latter focus on hotels and street level prostitution, according to Woolf. “In gang-controlled situations, it’s usually going to be that the girl is from the area. When it’s a pimp … it’ll probably be girls from all over the place,” he said.

A woman, who I met through the Thomson Reuters Foundation and who asked that I not use her name to ensure her safety, was pulled in by a pimp when she was 17 years old. Before then, her life was fairly ordinary. She had a good upbringing—a closely knit family and comfortable home. But in high school, she learned that her mother had been embezzling money from her company, and would be sentenced to seven years in prison. That changed everything.

After her mother was gone, she acted out and her relationship with her father fell apart, she told me. So when a guy on Facebook reached out with caring messages, she took notice. “He said everything I wanted to hear, especially with my mom being away,” the woman said. After she graduated high school, the two decided to meet. Then, at 17 years old, she bought a bus ticket to see him, planning to stay with him for a week. But to her surprise, the man, about seven years her elder, immediately told her she needed to make money upon arriving, if she intended to stay with him.

For four days, she said, she worked for him by going to an area for commercial sex. Soon after, another pimp approached her, promising to fill a void—family. She stayed with him for a few months until returning home to see her mother released from prison, after two years instead of seven. Later, she told me, another man courted her on Facebook, asking her to join him in Texas. He also was a pimp.

Unbeknownst to her at the time, the man, who was part of a ring, was luring her in. The woman and up to seven others were taken across state lines to strip and engage in commercial sex. She recalls going to Colorado, Arizona, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. When she arrived to Baltimore, Maryland, she had had enough. “That situation was really, really hard for me,” she told me. But leaving was out of the question. If anyone tried to run away, the girls and the men were tasked with stopping them, she told me, adding that she also had no phone and couldn’t be on Facebook. “Literally my rights were ripped from me.”

When the FBI, with the assistance of the Baltimore Police Department S.W.A.T. team broke up the ring, she, too, felt as if she were an offender. “I thought I was getting arrested. I didn’t look at them like they were there to save me. I looked at them like they were there to arrest me,” she said. The FBI had been investigating the ring for two years.