Back in 2023, reporter Abigail Shrier wrote an exposé on what was at stake when a new piece of legislation from California State Senator Scott Weiner was passed. SB 357 decriminalizes loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. What could possibly go wrong? Well, here we are now in 2025, and the plight of women and children who have been dragged into the life of prostitution, trafficking, and slavery has become a burgeoning hell — and the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department are tied.

The LAPD is no longer allowed to round up women walking the streets in lingerie because that ostensibly discriminates against black, brown, and gender-confused people. By the way, Scott Weiner is running for Congress, and this architect of depravity and misery is planning on bringing his policies to the national stage.

The situation has gotten so bad that it even caught the attention of The New York Times this week. The Times article is disheartening, though quite thorough and worth perusing, but the inevitable conclusion is that left-wing social policies are further enslaving and destroying the women and girls of Los Angeles.

There is a street eight minutes south of USC known as “the Blade.” For several miles on Figueroa Street, streetwalkers, some perilously young, are bought and sold for sex. They are watched over by their traffickers, who keep them in line with brute force and threats. This stretch of the red light district has grown exponentially, as traffickers from all over the country are moving in and setting up shop.

Some of the trafficked girls are preteens (11 or 12). In fact, the child sex trafficking that occurs on Figueroa Street has resulted in that infamous stretch being dubbed “Kiddie Stroll.” The Times, which tells the story from the perspective of a young woman named Ana, relayed the following devastating information:

Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.

These young women were lured onto the streets by traffickers parked outside their group homes or foster placements, or by traffickers and groomers on social media. As the Times colorfully put it, “There were the ‘Romeo’ types, who would flatter a girl, take her on a few dates, and then send her out to the Blade. And then there were the ‘gorilla’ types, who acquired a girl by brute force.” These girls are like the Barbie dolls that have been broken and mauled by a savage child.

Remember in December 2020 when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “Sex work is work”? Figueroa Street is the natural corollary. Children — largely minority runaways and foster kids who have fallen off the radar — are sold into sexual slavery. One would hope that AOC, in light of Los Angeles’s devolving situation, comes to realize that her statement was disastrously wrong. Sex work is slavery that diminishes the soul.

The Free Press’s Madeleine Rowley asked an anti-sex trafficking organization if the number of illegal aliens who flooded the country under the Biden administration contributed to the explosion of sex workers on the street. The answer was a resounding “Yes.”

Conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey has an intuitive saying: “Children are always the unwilling participants in progressive social experiments.” California’s social experiment — the radical sexualization of children, the decriminalization of prostitution and soliciting sex, and rampant sex trafficking — has created a literal hell on Figueroa Street.

Even more alarming, the reckless and heartless lawmakers of California are lining up victims for a more bloodthirsty predator: serial killers. California is known for its host of depraved serial killers, particularly during the 1970s, and many of them preyed on prostitutes. Guess what else happened during that era in California? In the wake of the sexual revolution, prostitution became more prevalent. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times wrote:

The increase in violence is one of many ways prostitution has been transformed:

— Ten prostitutes have been killed in Los Angeles since 1984 by a man who is still at large. And five serial killers have preyed on prostitutes and street people in Los Angeles since the late 1970s. In addition to the serial killings, usually one prostitute a month is murdered in Los Angeles County — twice as many as 10 years ago — estimated Los Angeles police vice Detective Fred Clapp.

— An increasing number of customers are requesting violent or kinky sexual services and seeking younger girls, prostitutes and call girls say. In the past, these services could only be found through an underground network; now they are out in the open.

Later in the piece, the LA Times revealed this very telling piece of information: “The number of teen-age prostitutes in Los Angeles began to proliferate in the late 1970s… As juvenile laws changed, police could no longer pick up suspected runaways, put them in Juvenile Hall and call their parents. So a new population of teen-age streets children evolved.”

Again, this was written 40 years ago. Do you see a pattern that is playing out on repeat? Sexual deviance and drugs, in addition to bad lawmaking, have made prostitution, including underage prostitution, a big issue in California. And it’s not getting any better because lawmakers are refusing to do what it takes to help these vulnerable women and girls. In fact, that state’s Democrat lawmakers continue to make it easier for pimps to keep women in sexual slavery for as long as they are useful.

This truth is a far cry from the progressive assertion that “sex work is work.” The LAPD is doing what it can within the confines of the law, but lawmakers don’t seem to care at all, and the problem is getting worse. These are people’s children. These are individuals created in the image of God. This is not a life that any woman should have.

It prompts one to echo the question posed in the New York Times’s title: “Can anyone rescue the trafficked girls of L.A.‘s Figueroa Street?” The answer so far is “No.”