just saw that pic a few breads ago
shoulda fukken saved
Wonder why Travis would be so loud?
Look at the area.
Port
Close to a rail line
Just off of the interstate
Mental health facility across the road
Goat Hill park around the corner
Military base a few blocks away
San Diego's sex trade is second-largest underground economy after drugs
We need our hearts broken over this
By Siobhan Braun, June 22, 2016
A leopard-print sign hanging on Andrea Smith’s front door announces, “I am a luxury few can afford.” Three years ago there was heavy truth in that statement. Smith was bringing in about $2500 a night turning tricks.
“I charged $500 for a half hour, full service — meaning blow job and sex — and $1000 for the girlfriend experience. That was the loving, the hugging, the kissing, the affection, and the holding. A lot of people wanted that because they might have a girlfriend or wife at home, but they wanted something [different] with me.”
Smith gave up drugs and prostitution after a severe beating handed down by her pimp and his friends landed her in the hospital and caused her to miscarry twin babies. She is now living at a seven-acre women’s rehabilitation center in San Diego with her two children, a sixth-month-old and three-year-old. The program provides a free two-bedroom, furnished, apartment for up to a year until Smith gets back on her feet.
“I was introduced to the life of prostitution when I was 11 through my mother. I was selling my body in order for her to get high off of crack cocaine.”
The first time Smith sold her body, her mother was on her menstrual cycle. “She said, ‘Baby, could you do this favor for me; just this one time? I need you to suck [my client’s] dick. It will only be this time. I promise.’ Instead of giving the guy head he ended up proceeding further and he had sex with me. He paid my mom $70–$80, I think. I remember crying myself to sleep. My mom came into the room and said, ‘Why the fuck are you crying? He only had sex with you!’ I said, ‘But I didn’t want to do it.’ I just wanted to wash it away and feel pretty again, but that never happened. By the age of 14 I had already slept with over 40 men,” Smith recalls.
In 2001, the FBI listed San Diego among the top destinations for child sex trafficking in the United States. Fifteen years later, the problem has intensified. The sex trade is now the second-largest underground economy in our city after the sale of drugs. According to a recent study by the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University on the relationship between gangs and sex trafficking in San Diego, sex trafficking grosses an estimated $810 million dollars annually in San Diego. What enables sex trafficking to be so lucrative for local gangs is that there is no initial investment or need to keep an inventory. One woman can gross anywhere from $500 to $10,000 a day, depending on sporting events or conventions in town, and she rarely sees a penny of the profit.
Perhaps more alarming is the average age in which local girls enter the trade: 15. The national average is even more startling — between 12 and14 years of age. The number-one place for both recruiting victims and for selling them is online. The University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene study suggests that between 8830 and 11,773 women, mostly young girls, are victimized in the San Diego sex trade. That’s more than twice the population of Del Mar.