Author’s Preface

When I set out to write this series, I intended to tell the truth.

Sex trafficking does not wait for its victims to reach legal age. Anti-trafficking researchers and advocacy organizations consistently identify early adolescence as the primary window during which girls are first commercially sexually exploited in the United States. Reliable statistics on the true average age do not exist, in part because the children most deeply embedded in these networks are the least visible to researchers and law enforcement alike. What is documented: minors are disproportionately represented among identified trafficking victims, and the McCain Institute’s six-year analysis of sex traffickers of minors confirms that the overwhelming majority of victims are children, trafficked well before any legal threshold of adulthood. These are not edge cases. This is the operational reality of the pipeline that runs through the borderlands where these books are set.

I am not speaking theoretically. In 1989, I attended a high school in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The average age of a high school freshman is 14 to 15 years old. I personally witnessed freshman girls who were pregnant, many of them already mothers, about to deliver their second child. This was not trafficking. These were choices made by children who had learned, in the way that children in desperate circumstances learn things, that the welfare system could be gamed by having children of their own. From the small sample of people I personally knew, this was not accidental. They understood what they were doing and why: children trying to cement a consistent future income from the government. Fourteen and fifteen years old, already on their second pregnancy. That was Milwaukee in 1989, before the internet, before cartel pipelines reached into American neighborhoods the way they do now. I knew what I was writing about before I wrote a word of it.

Underage sex is a reality. Not being able to depict it as the horror it is in fiction is a dishonest denial of that reality. I bring this up not because I have any desire to write exploitative content. Far from it. The goal was never shock value or titillation. The goal was to show the wound clearly enough that the reader cannot look away. But the inability to present it as horror, to let it land with the full weight it deserves, squelches a conversation that desperately needs to happen. We cannot treat a thing with the seriousness it requires if we are not allowed to show what it is.

In my first draft of these stories, the Levantadas were 13 to 16 years old. That was already a concession. My first draft did not even reach the bottom of the range the statistics describe. What you are reading now is a second concession, made on top of the first, that gutted me to make. The characters are depicted as eighteen at the time of their embrace. That number was forced on the story by the only context in which it can exist publicly. No publisher will touch it. No platform will host it. The literature world, for all its claims about bearing witness to darkness, draws a firm line at the truth of when this darkness actually begins.

The ages on the page are the novocaine. The true weight of what trafficking does, and when it does it, sits just beneath what I was permitted to write.

To the girls this story is about: I am sorry. I was not able to tell your story the way it deserved to be told. I was not able to stand on my principles when the platform drew its line. I compromised the integrity that your reality desperately deserved.

However, in order to tell your story at all, in order for it to exist in a world that would rather turn a blind eye than face the truth in full, this gutting of the horror is what was required. The alternative was silence. And silence has never saved anyone.

You deserved better than what the world would allow me to give you.

- E.L. Frederick

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