Many Americans think of sex trafficking as something that happens elsewhere or that its only victims are transported to the United States from foreign lands. A film that was screened last week at Albany Law School, “Very Young Girls,” makes it clear it’s here. Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of sex trafficking, has devoted her life to helping girls who have been tangled in its web.

She founded and directs the Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, known as GEMS, and also co-produced the documentary. The film shows that American girls are being sold on the streets, trapped, with no way out.

The girls featured in the documentary are as young as 12 when they fall prey to pimps who exploit them. One courtroom scene shows a girl who accepted a ride and, at age 13, was held for four or five days, forced to have sex some 30 times, her lawyer says. She is being tried for prostitution. Her crying mother says, “She was treated like a criminal — taken to jail instead of to a hospital.”

That girl was lucky to have a judge that paroled her, putting her in her mother’s custody, and requiring her to attend GEMS sessions.

But others are not so lucky. Why should we, as a society, treat children who are trafficked like criminals rather than like the victims they are?

Another scene in the film shows the “Brooklyn John School” where the men who have been arrested  are told their cases will be dismissed in six months with clean records. The men have a good laugh soon after being told the girls they are soliciting are, on average, 13 or 14 years old.

It’s not a laughing matter. According to the United States Department of Justice, the sex trade is the third most profitable illegal activity in our country — behind drug and weapon trafficking — generating between $7 billion and $19 billion annually.

Congress first addressed the issue with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000 but that focuses largely on international women and girls. To fill that gap, New York State adopted the Anti-Human trafficking Law in 2007 and the Exploited children Act in 2008. The state also set up Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, mostly in urban areas, to provide support services for defendants to help them leave the sex trade.

“Despite having the most progressive and comprehensive legal framework to combat sex trafficking in the country, New York ranks among the top four states with the worst human trafficking problem in the nation, behind California, Florida, and Texas,” writes Rebecca Ruscito, counsel for the New York Council of Mayors, in NYCOM’s Summer 2017 bulletin.

She notes the Center for Court Innovation estimates between 70 to 90 percent of prostituted minors were sexually abused as children and they are easily manipulated by the same power and control dynamics used by sex traffickers.

Ruscito notes there is a disconnect between the intent of the laws and prosecution. In 2016, there were just 65 arrests and arraignments for sex trafficking under the state’s penal law; only eight resulted in convictions. At the same time, there were 1,560 prostitution arrests of which 484 resulted in convictions.

“Clearly traffickers are undeterred from continuing their nefarious trade,” she writes, “while victims endure criminal charges and convictions. This has resulted in exceptionally skewed statistics overemphasizing prostitution as a culpable decision and underrepresenting the ubiquitous incidence of forced sex trafficking.”

Because women and girls who are prostitutes are often perceived of as choosing that life, the crimes are sometimes considered unworthy of law enforcement.

Ruscito sees a role for local governments to play since they are closest to citizens. They can bring together the sometimes divergent interests of law enforcement and social services. By knowing which services can help trafficking victims, courts would be able to use diversion programs for treatment as an alternative to incarceration.

Ruscito concludes, “By developing a coordinated response to human trafficking, local governments may help stymie the commercial sex industry and serve as an integral component to effectively abolishing domestic slavery.”

We urge local governments to make that effort. Victims should be helped, not punished.

We made that argument in an editorial 13 years ago after a Guilderland arrest report listed a prostitute as an offender and a john as the victim. “Who is the victim?” we asked as we lauded the Swedish system. While prostitutes elsewhere are often stigmatized, we wrote, in Sweden the law is set up so that the women and children in prostitution are viewed as victims of a crime, which not only changes their legal status but also changes how they are seen and treated by others.

This week, we were pleased when Guilderland’s police chief, Carol Lawlor Lawlor told us, “People selling themselves are the victims. We would be sensitive to that kind of thing. Nothing is black and white anymore,” she said. “It’s a very, very sad situation.”

Groups like Safe Inc., a not-for-profit in Schenectady that helps at-risk youth, are making headway.

Melanie Puorto-Conte, the resource director at Safe Inc., had formerly been the director of suicide prevention for the state’s Office of Mental Health. She said she got involved with her current work after 11 young girls committed suicide in Schenectady. “Gangs were trafficking them,” she said. “Killing themselves was the only way out … That started my journey.”

While the film “Very Young Girls” portrayed girls soliciting on the street, Puorto-Conte said, “What we see locally is all the marketing on social media.” Generally, the currency used is bitcoin because it can’t be traced, making prosecution very difficult, she said. Ads are posted on social media to find johns, and naive teens also expose themselves to exploitation on social media.

Puorto-Conte spoke, too, about the stigma that surrounds, and imprisons, victims of sex trafficking. That’s something each and every one of us can do something about. We need a culture shift.

Puorto-Conte described going to a Habitat for Humanity store to find household goods for a trafficking survivor, arranging ahead for the visit.

“You mean the prostitute?” said a staffer at the store.

When Puorto-Conte persisted, “A trafficking survivor,” the store clerk responded, “Oh, you’re just one of those politically-correct people.”

If we think of Lloyd’s documentary, we can see the girls were trapped. They were victims. They were not making a choice to be prostitutes; they had no choice. Some of the girls talked of killing themselves as the only way out. Lloyd’s GEMS program offered them another way — but not an easy way. It took courage and constancy.

Even a girl who at 13 fell into the clutches of a pimp after fleeing domestic violence in her home, a girl who went through four years at GEMS to get her own apartment, marry a good man, become a counselor at GEMS in order to help others, said, “I’m still struggling with what he did to me.”

She’ll no doubt struggle with it every day for the rest of her life. She deserves, not our condemnation, but our respect and admiration.