Expectations tend to be high for children’s quality of life in Hamilton County’s high-end suburban communities. Only the best. Only the safest. Only the brightest of opportunities for kids to thrive.

Yet, even here, the child sex trade festers.

In 2016, authorities identified nine children from Hamilton County, all girls, who were purchased by adult buyers for sex, often in hotels in the Castleton area. The youngest victim was 11 years old.

“These are students at Carmel High, Fishers and Hamilton Southeastern,” said Addie Wood, an attorney with the Hamilton County Guardian Ad Litem program. “We’ve also worked with students in intermediate schools.”

In most instances, pimps groomed and recruited the girls through social media — the pimp in one case was only 16 years old — and then sold their victims on websites such as Backpage. (Backpage pulled its “adult services” ads off the site this week in response to a U.S. Senate report that found company employees had deleted evidence that children were being sold for sex.)

The number of identified victims almost certainly does not tell the full story. State, national and international experts I’ve interviewed as part of a long-term project on child trafficking consistently say that authorities see only a fraction of the number of children trapped by the sex trade.

A U.S. Department of Justice-funded study released last year set a 25 percent identification rate as the best case on a national level. That study, completed by the Center for Court Innovation, found that between 8,900 and 10,500 youths, ages 13 to 17, work in the sex trade in a year. Those victims are purchased on average 5.4 times each day they work. And boys make up more than 30 percent of youths involved in the trade.

The Indiana State Report on Human Trafficking, issued in December by the state attorney general’s office, identified 120 sex trafficking victims under age 18 in the first 10 months of last year. The youngest victim was 7 years old; the average age was 15.6 years.

Tracy McDaniel, who founded a local anti-trafficking organization called Restored Inc. in 2013, helps provide victims in Hamilton County with counseling and other services. She said, based on the local cases she’s handled, that a pimp can make $1,500 to $2,500 a week per girl. Girls are sold six to 15 times a day, and work four to seven days a week.

Those numbers help show the tremendous demand for commercial sex, here and across the county, and the frequency with which children are exploited in the trade. The nine children from Hamilton County likely were purchased by hundreds of men.

To put it bluntly: Children are raped for profit every day, multiple times a day, in our city, state and nation. And our response to that crime, to the tremendous damage it inflicts on victims, is far from adequate.

The children, the vast majority abused before they were exploited in the commercial sex trade, are broken, physically and emotionally. After rescue, the path to recovery is tortuous.

I’ve interviewed survivors who said their trust in men, even their faith in God, was shattered for years because of who it was who purchased them. Fathers who talked about their daughters. Husbands who talked about their wives. Pastors, teachers, public officials and police who shredded the view of still-developing children that people in positions of authority can be trusted.

“These are not Barbies on a shelf,” McDaniel said. “These girls have real issues. They’ve been sexually molested; they’ve been abused repeatedly. These kids need complex trauma treatment.”

Yet, as Shelley Haymaker, director of Hamilton County’s Guardian Ad Litem noted, services in Indiana are far from adequate for trafficking victims and others trying to cope with mental health problems. So some victims wind up in juvenile detention or prison; the root causes of their destructive behavior unaddressed.

“The girls who are the victims are treated like the problem,” Wood said. “I just get so frustrated.”

And where, I asked, do the buyers go?

“They go home,” McDaniel said. “The buyers get nothing. We aren’t taking buyers seriously, and we won’t be until our lawmakers decide that if you buy sex from a minor, it’s a felony.”

Again, that’s a lament I’ve heard across this country and others. The children suffer horribly. The buyers move on, most often without legal or social consequence.

I asked Addie Wood, not long out of law school when she handled Hamilton County’s first child trafficking case in May 2015, what she had learned from working with trafficking victims. She first mentioned she’d been struck by how evil people can be.

But later, Wood said that the victims’ resiliency has impressed her.

“The girls can overcome this. One girl completed her first college classes. Others are making progress,” she said. “There is hope.”

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @tswarens.

Sold for Sex: Inside the Brutal World of Child Trafficking

IndyStar opinion director Tim Swarens has started a long-term project to investigate child sex trafficking, domestically and abroad. The series is planned for publication late this year.

If you would like Swarens to discuss his ongoing research with a community group, religious congregation or class, please contact him at tim.swarens@indystar.com.

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