Oakland residents and agencies are the first to have access to HELP4U, a new and free interactive web-based platform that locates and connects people to healthcare, job training and childcare services in Oakland and other parts of Alameda County. 

by Barabara Grady and Sarah Terry-Cobo

This is Part 5 of an eight-part, four-day Oakland Local investigative series on youth sex trafficking.

In Alameda County, Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock has been on a hard-fought campaign to change California law.

Together with state Assemblyman Sandre Swanson (D-Oakland), Bock has crafted laws that switch the criminalization in prostitution to the pimps and johns and away from girls. They successfully drafted and pushed through law AB 499, which recognizes that youth who are traded are victims in this crime who deserve services. They also drafted, introduced and ushered into law AB 17, which toughened the sentencing of and restitution required from convicted pimps.

However, the biggest challenge is convicting the pimps. It's difficult for police even to have grounds to arrest them...

This is Part 2 of an eight-part, four-day Oakland Local investigative series on youth sex trafficking. Continued from Part 1.

Who is this "commodity" being traded on the street? Statistically she is a 13-year-old girl who has run away from an abusive parent, guardian or foster home. Too young to fend for herself as a runaway, she ends up under the control of a pimp who promises to take care of her. Then the trafficker turns on her and, either by emotional manipulation or physical threat, gets the girl to work the streets to bring in money. 

"These are children who have never known love, so they look for love in all the wrong places," said Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock, who has directed 148 cases against people alleged to have sold teenagers and children for sex. "All the pimp has to say is, 'Baby I love you and some day I want to have a family with you but today I'm short of cash. Can you help me make the rent?'" Bock continued. 

by Barbara Grady

This begins our eight-part, four-day Oakland Local investigative series on youth sex trafficking.

It's nearly midnight on a Thursday and teen-age girls are on every corner of International Boulevard in the dozen blocks stretching south from 41st Street. Many are dressed up. But this is not prom night or a concert letting out.

Some have bruises on their bodies; some are pregnant. Not far from any one of them is a sex trafficker who stands to make $500 a night from each girl he or she controls. Recruited with promises of love, or sometimes simply kidnapped, the girls are then put out on the streets.

These girls are commodities in a slave trade that is rampant in Oakland and similar cities across America, law enforcement and social workers say -- one that's growing with the recession. It's a trade in which adolescents peddle their flesh to make money for pimps in exchange for food, shelter and affection. Some are held against their will and continue the work to avoid getting beat up or tortured.