LOS ANGELES—At Figueroa and 69th Streets girls appearing as young as 15 stood in G-Strings and unbuttoned blouses, one Wednesday evening earlier this month, as cars idled in a small traffic jam under the weak glow of faded street lights.
Even on a weeknight, Los Angeles’s busiest area for sex work—known colloquially as “The Blade”—has smiling men with their car windows down shopping for women and girls.
In this South LA neighborhood, outreach groups say, young women and underage teens are encouraged to solicit sex for profit by the overwatch of their pimps.
“A ‘John Jam’ is like a traffic jam but with people lined up to buy the girls for sex,” Mari Clark—with the After-Hours Ministry, a Christian organization working to help victims of sexual exploitation—told The Epoch Times from the passenger seat of a van the organization uses to help prostitutes in the area….