The 2012 film Eden distills all of our culture’s fears about underage sex trafficking into a single nightmare narrative. It shows dozens of young girls kidnapped from high school, forced into prostitution, and then murdered when they get too old for their dissipated clientele. Immoral, heartless criminals preying on innocent, attractive cissexual girls: This is a trafficking story that resonates.

Eden was supposedly based on the true life experiences of a woman named Chong Kim, and when it was first released it received rapturous media accolades. But it was later revealed that the film was largely fabricated. Indeed, the truth is much less sensational: Most domestic minors in the sex industry are not kidnapping victims. They’re children who have fallen out with their parents (often because they are gay or trans), or been forced from their homes, and who sell sex to survive. And the biggest danger they face is not from organized rings of predatory criminals, but from the police.

That’s one of the central insights in Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains, a new book by RTI International researcher Alexandra Lutnick. Youth in the sex trade are a criminalized and stigmatized population, and it’s very difficult to survey them or get accurate statistics about their experiences. But Lutnick told me by email that in her research and those of others, “It is not uncommon to hear that young people experience violence more often from law enforcement officials than from any other group.”

In the worst cases, this violence takes the form of physical and sexual assault. Lutnick reports on one incident in which an underage transgender woman in New Orleans was forced to have oral sex with a police officer in order to avoid arrest, and another in which an underage cisgender worker was forced to fondle a police officer for five minutes. “I don’t understand,” the girl told her caseworker, “If he’s an undercover cop and I’m a minor isn’t he not supposed to, you know, let me do that?” (Lutnick also discussed this incident in testimony before a California public safety committee in 2015.)

Kristen DiAngelo, the executive director of the Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP) Sacramento told me by phone that this kind of police abuse is common and persistent. DiAngelo worked in a massage parlor when she was in high school in the 1970s and early 1980s. “There was this team, two police officers—one was Hispanic one was Asian—that’s all I remember, young men,” she told me. “They’d come over and pick me up and they would take turns doing that with all the girls all over town, they’d take you out to the field, have sex with you—we’d call it rape now. But back then you just did what the police officer wanted. They’d dump you out in the field, it was surrounded by farmland and you had to figure out a way to hitchhike back in.”