A sixteen year old girl has dinner with her parents before sneaking out of her house in the suburbs to go to the dimmer part of town where she will engage in forced sex and drug use with men much older than she. Her ‘night’ won’t end until 4 a.m. when she will creep back up to her room to sleep before her alarm sounds for school.

On the other side of town another girl waits alone for the school bus. A man approaches and tells her she looks nice. She blushes and a relationships blooms. She, too, is then sold into sex being paid in drugs or money for a fraction of what she is worth.

This is sex trafficking; the modern form of slavery. Although it is often associated with physical abduction, and still can be, sex trafficking has evolved to children sneaking out at night and being flattered into thinking that what they are doing is normal. The scenarios described above were discovered through news reports of court testimonies and happened to high school aged girls who live within 10 miles of Annandale High School in the past 6 years. The epidemic of human trafficking, especially young girls for sex, is growing while the warning signs seem to be diminishing.

“The girls will usually lie about where they are going and say they are going to a friends house or to practice after school and end up being trafficked,” said Anna Hanson, case manager and assistant to the director of human services at the northern Virginia (NoVA) Human Trafficking Initiative (HTI) said. “Some warning signs would be if someone seems anxious or scared or not as personable as they typically are. Or especially if they start lying about where the are going or posting different things on social media.”

Virginia ranks fifth amongst the states for the number of total trafficking cases and 44% of all trafficking involves a juvenile being sold for commercial sex. Half of the reported cases of sex trafficking in the state of Virginia occur in NoVA; out of 465 calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 232 were from NoVA.

“Girls often try to find their worth in guys and think it’s cool to have a boyfriend and then it just spirals out of control,” Hanson said. “Most people in northern Virginia are very wealthy and there is a type of esteem related to that and a lot of girls are looking for  love maybe because their parents aren’t around or because they are trying to prove themselves.”

Annandale, located in the heart of Northern Virginia (Nova), is no exception to sex trafficking. In 2012 Susan Lee Gross, the owner of an Annandale massage parlor, called Peach Therapy, pled guilty to sex trafficking. She was reported “transporting women from other states to perform sexual services for patrons of her Annandale-based massage parlor.”

Peach Therapy was located on Backlick road and served as a prostitution ring in a busy office park. Gross advertised on sites such as craigslist.com and backpage.com and decorated her welcoming storefront with two cameras mounted above the paper covered windows that sandwiched the door.

Once in court Gross admitted to her wrong doings and was sentenced to 30 months in prison but she still just one of thousands of pimps and traffickers located across NoVA and the District.

“Trafficking doesn’t care how old you are or if you’re a guy or a girl, it doesn’t care how much money you make. Your trafficker will be aware of those things and will use those things against you,” Hanson said. “[Traffickers] do their research; they know what buttons to push.”

A survey conducted from 2013 to 2015 was able to identify 290 victims of this modern day slavery and recover 115 victims. Gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) have be charged with human trafficking and the growing gang has helped to put NoVA in the top ten areas for teen trafficking in the Nation, with the average victim age being between 12 and 17 years old.

In 2012 a 16 year old girl was raped at Springfield Mall by members of a barbaric gang known as the “Underground Gangster Crips” (UGC) who use sex as a form of gang initiation, threatening the teenage girls with violence if they attempted to leave the prostitution ring.

But that crime just scratches the surface. The five gang members who were arrested in the incident all attended Lee High School or Bryant Alternative School. The Crips were also known to abduct girls from bus stops and take them door-to-door in Arlington where men would pay for intercourse with them.

“These gang members are alleged to have lured many area high school girls into the vile world of prostitution, and used violence and threats to keep them working as indentured sex slaves,” said U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride in a written statement regarding the arrests.

The “CEO” of the sex trade was Justin Strom, who would pick girls up at Metro stations, in high school hallways and on street corners and “brainwash” them to think having sex with older men for money was normal. Strom was 26 when he was arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

“[Strom’s] a con artist, a monster and a manipulator,” a woman who was sold into sex by Strom said in a court testimony. “I still feel broken and worthless. I feel like I’m at the bottom, and I can’t get out.”

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that although Strom and his accomplices are in prison there are still many more culprits who live off of selling sex.

According to the NoVA HTI there are currently more than 500 open investigations surrounding sex trafficking in NoVA and in 2016 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that 1 in 6 runaways reported were most likely a victim of sex trafficking.

The recent outrage over missing girls in D.C. circles around the same ideals. 14 girls have gone missing in the past two months and the posters that read “critically missing” are failing to help bring the girls home. The red and white banner atop the flier, which is designed to gain attention, is often overlooked as the absence of minority women and children is usually reported as “running away from home” rather than kidnapping or sex trafficking and Amber Alerts will only be sent out in the case of abduction.

The “#MissingDCGirls” went trending on Instagram and Twitter attracting attention from celebrities such as Viola Davis and LL Cool J as well as masses of the public but have failed to help find the girls.

The use of social media is a two way street; it can help to bring attention but also can serve as a trap for human trafficking.

The digital age has increased youth susceptibility to sex trafficking, allowing traffickers and kidnappers to use social media to stalk and capture their victims. Pimps have been reported to use Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Kik as “virtual brothels.”

Although the danger of human trafficking is seemingly growing so are methods used by law enforcement and school employees to educate and protect young children.

“Starting this year students in grades six through twelve will receive human trafficking awareness in the classroom,” said William Woolf, a detective tasked with investigating human trafficking in Fairfax County, in an online letter to the community in 2014. “This will not only serve to raise awareness among the students, but give them practical steps to prevent themselves from being victimized, and empower them to help those around them that may be on the path of getting themselves trapped in this horrible lifestyle.”

Organizations such as the JustAsk campaign are also avidly working to combat trafficking through a variety of governmental and community groups. In 2014 the organization helped to stop Tayron Weeks, a 24 year old man, from exploiting a 14 year old he met at the Braddock Road Metro Station. Weeks pled guilty in court.

“It is unknown how many children were saved from being future victims because of the courageous efforts of this teen and the awareness raised by the efforts of the JustAsk campaign,” Woolf said in the online letter. “My hope is that the community becomes reinvigorated in our fight against human trafficking and that we all remain ever-vigilant.”