She was raised by an alcoholic who was addicted to drugs and taught her, when she was 6, how to perform oral sex on a man. Simpkins says intervention by social workers might have spared her a brutal career being beaten by a pimp when she didn’t earn a daily quota of $1,000.

She estimates that over the years she was arrested about 200 times for prostitution and other offenses; her pimp, never.

Eventually, Simpkins escaped that life and now works with an outstanding program in Tennessee called Thistle Farms that helps exploited women start new lives and find employment.

As world leaders prepare to gather at the United Nations, some 40 million people are effectively locked into modern forms of slavery, according to the Global Slavery Index. That includes sex trafficking but also child marriages and a great deal of forced labor.

In the United States, no one knows exactly how many children are sold for sex, but estimates have run between 10,000 and 100,000 in any given year. Whatever the number, it’s too many.

President Trump and Ivanka Trump have both denounced sex trafficking, with the president saying he will leverage “every resource” to address this “urgent humanitarian issue.” Ivanka Trump has said that fighting trafficking is a major priority of her father’s administration.

But while the attention is welcome, it seems to be largely hot air — and Trump’s lurid descriptions of trafficking seem mostly to be a misleading rationale for his border wall. In fact, under Trump, the federal government is easing up on human traffickers.