BY NINA ALVAREZ
Last fall, the New York Times magazine published a story by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, a national health reporter, about the commercial sexual exploitation of children on a fifty-block stretch of Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles known as the Blade. To report the piece, Baumgaertner Nunn embedded with vice investigators for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as they carried out undercover operations. She also interviewed dozens of people—trafficking survivors, aid workers, experts, officials. Accompanying the text were photographs by Katy Grannan, an art photographer who contributes frequently to the Times, depicting Black and brown women and girls, baring skin, in platform heels, most in police custody, some in handcuffs. The headline asked, “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of LA’s Figueroa Street?”
The piece quickly received praise from many journalists. This spring, it was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. But Alia Azariah, a survivor advocate, said that, when a girl depicted in the story came across a post promoting it, she reached out to her, saying she was scared that she would be identifiable—including to the people who trafficked her. And as it turned out, this was not the only negative response the piece received. Advocacy organizations contacted the Times privately over several weeks post-publication, expressing concern about the reporting and photographs, wanting to know how consent was obtained, and asking Baumgaertner Nunn to reconsider elements of the story.
Five weeks after publication, no changes had been made. Twenty-two organizations that work on survivor and foster care sent a joint letter to Jessica Dimson, the director of photography at the Times magazine, citing the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. The groups focused on the pictures, which, they wrote, “do real and lasting damage” and should be removed from the internet. Though the subjects were generally shot from behind or in profile, they could very well be recognizable to anyone familiar with the Blade. “Using identifiable images of young people who are being detained, pursued, or exploited, particularly when minors may be involved, is not responsible journalism or simply news reporting in the public interest,” the letter read. “It is re-exploitation.” The captions on the images were concerning, too—referring to “a stable of a dozen girls,” echoing the dehumanizing language of traffickers.
The magazine declined to take the images down. Dimson’s position was that the photographs had been published with care and that readers needed to see what was happening, noting in her reply to the organizations that their mission was different from that of advocates. The response did not address the matter of consent. When CJR followed up to ask about the photography process, Dimson responded by email: “We applied scrupulous editorial judgment,” she wrote. “We considered and discussed the circumstances in which each photograph was taken, and all of the platforms on which they were published. We weighed matters related to consent—which we ensured was given for every photograph we published—as well as privacy, safety and long-term impact. These are questions we always ask, but when a story involves vulnerable populations we take them especially seriously.”
Margaret Sullivan, a columnist who writes on media, politics, and culture for The Guardian US and a former Times public editor, said that it was “unusual to have that many groups with a common base of understanding, to get together and protest so strongly and so vehemently. I think it’s certainly noteworthy.” Had Sullivan still been the public editor, she said, she would have made the joint letter public and written about it; the role no longer exists.
I can recognize some of my own instincts in the Times’ choices. Almost twenty years ago, I reported and filmed Very Young Girls, a documentary about children in the process of exiting sexual exploitation in New York City. It has since been used for policy work and law enforcement training, and still circulates around the anti-trafficking field. I am proud of what it accomplished. But I would not make the film the same way today. When I worked on the documentary, the girls I filmed were criminalized. They are now recognized as victims. New science has documented the lasting impact of chronic sexual violence on brain development, on decision-making, on the capacity for genuine consent. New legal protections exist. And new journalistic standards have been built—specifically to ensure that a survivor can say yes only when she is truly ready.
That change has been visible, in many ways, through the coverage of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald investigation did more than expose a decades-long trafficking operation and the prosecutors who let it go unpunished; it shifted the framing dramatically. Our field has come a long way in managing the undeniable tension between the need to cover the story of commercial sexual exploitation of children and the risk such coverage can pose to people living in a dangerous situation.
Even so, the attention surrounding Epstein also reveals a persistent gap in public perception and understanding. The story inspired global outrage in large part because it involved extraordinarily powerful men, elite institutions, private jets, a private island, and mostly white victims who, years later, were able to come forward publicly, be believed, and seek justice. Barely heard in the national conversation are the thousands of children who are being trafficked right now—today, tonight—in cities, suburbs, rural communities, and tribal lands across the United States. This scourge falls most heavily, as violence generally does, on children of color, LGBTQI+ youth, and children from lower-income communities. Many of them cannot safely tell their stories. They may not know they have a story to tell—they might just think this is normal.
The Times piece about Figueroa Street entered that realm; as Baumgaertner Nunn reported, the Blade is “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.” But the story was built largely on a ride-along with police, outdated tropes, and images that risk causing harm. There are alternatives that operate through a framework of care. “I hope journalists covering trafficking or any story involving people who’ve been deeply harmed really sit with the potential impact of their reporting,” Kay Buck, the chief executive officer of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), said. “Behind every award, accolade, or spike in website traffic is a real person reliving one of the worst moments of their life.”
Access
In 2023, Baumgaertner Nunn received a tip about a surge in sex trafficking of minors on the Blade. According to the Times, she spent the next two years reporting the story. The result is a narrative shaped almost entirely by four sources: two LAPD vice officers; Shannon Forsythe, the founder of Run 2 Rescue, a faith-based nonprofit; and a trafficked nineteen-year-old named Ana. The police played a crucial role, by providing access. “It took years of building trust and getting officers to agree to a ride-along,” Baumgaertner Nunn told KTLA, the local LA TV station, in an interview promoting the article. In an email (later shared with CJR) to Kristen Caloca, a media consultant who works with CAST, which has a long history of working in Los Angeles, Baumgaertner Nunn wrote, “It was eye-opening for me to discover through my reporting that law enforcement was the group on the front lines of the rescue efforts here.”
In the story’s climactic scene, on a Saturday night in January of 2025, Forsythe, riding with an undercover vice unit, spots Ana. She bolts from the car and chases her down the street while traffickers jump out of their cars, yelling. Ana is described calling out, “I can’t do this right now. Leave me alone. You’re going to get me in trouble.” Forsythe grabs her by the wrists and does not let go. They wind up at the police station, where Elizabeth Armendariz, an LAPD officer, refers to Ana as a cooperative “suspect” while another officer makes sure she counts as “a rescue.” At 2:18am, in a fluorescent-lighted interview room, Armendariz offers Ana an ice cream sandwich, then presses her for information on her traffickers.
The word “rescue” here is not neutral. “Rescue” is a law enforcement term—one that positions police as saviors, young women and girls as objects of intervention, and arrest-based operations as a necessary response to trafficking. Survivors and advocates have spent two decades pushing back against this language and approach. The general consensus in the field is that it fails those it claims to help: according to Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, three out of four people picked up on juvenile rescue operations return to their traffickers—a number the story reports, appended with a note from Brandon Nichols, the director of the county’s DCFS, saying that “our social workers do everything possible, as many times as necessary, to help these young people safely leave their captors and begin healing on their own terms.”
Stephanie Richard—the director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, who has been working on anti-trafficking in LA County for twenty years—wrote to Baumgaertner Nunn a few days after the story was published. “Your piece raises urgent questions about trafficking in Los Angeles,” she said, in an email shared with CJR. “But it also reinforces carceral myths that many survivors and advocates have spent years working to dismantle.”
When CJR asked Baumgaertner Nunn about the rescue framing, she replied, “We explain in our piece that investigators refer to juvenile pickups as ‘rescue ops,’ and much of our article is dedicated to showcasing why these operations do not lead to lasting escapes. The piece’s headline is not a declaration but a question. Many people who read the full story recognized an underlying truth in response to that question: When a girl permanently escapes the Blade, it is never because law enforcement or an aid organization ‘rescues’ her. It is because she has been given the necessary tools to choose a new path without fear of retribution, and she has drawn on her own strength to believe that she can and should do it.”
Access in and of itself can have news value. When, in April, Poynter gave the story the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence, the judges praised Baumgaertner Nunn for spending “years gaining trust and embedded with investigators on undercover operations.” Yet it is worth noting that she was not the first journalist to visit Figueroa Street: six months before her piece was published, the Times of London ran its own—same ride-along, same organizations, same cast of characters, including a survivor whose circumstances were strikingly similar to Ana’s. Samuel Lovett, the reporter, told me that he was introduced to Run 2 Rescue, and Forsythe, by the LAPD. The article followed the same rescue narrative. The access was not, apparently, hard to obtain. In the wake of a change in California law—the repeal of an anti-loitering rule disproportionately used to arrest Black, brown, and trans women based on appearance—this story was being offered. (The LAPD did not comment.) Its frame is one that journalists would be wise to identify and scrutinize.
Meaningful Consent
Baumgaertner Nunn writes that Ana was thirteen the first time she was trafficked. When Ana was nineteen—and had been trafficked a second time—Forsythe asked if she wanted to come back home. “I waited to meet a subject like Ana,” Baumgaertner Nunn told CJR, “who presented an extremely rare opportunity: an adult survivor who, by all ethical guidelines, could fully and knowingly consent to participating, had a rich support system, and had specific protections in place.” Baumgaertner Nunn described waiting months before approaching Ana about being profiled, ensuring that she had “surpassed an array of clinical markers that protect against re-trafficking.” When asked to identify those markers, and how they were assessed, Baumgaertner Nunn declined. “Ana is not publicly disclosing personal details about her life after the article’s closing scene,” she replied, “so we are not at liberty to discuss them either.”
The phrase “clinical markers” carries weight in the fields of social work and trauma psychology; Baumgaertner Nunn has a master’s degree in public health, and that is her beat. But experts who study trauma caused by chronic sexual abuse say there is no standardized list and that the process of assessing when a survivor is truly ready to tell their story publicly isn’t straightforward. Several studies document how trauma causes lasting changes to the parts of the brain that are central to informed, autonomous decision-making; a longitudinal study conducted at Duke University in 2014 found that only 22 percent of those who had been chronically abused or neglected “achieved resiliency” by the time they reached young adulthood. The central factors on which most survivor advocates rely to determine readiness for journalistic coverage are time and independence, including an absence of reliance on an organization that has been providing support.
I learned about the challenge of meeting this standard through my work on Very Young Girls. When I made the film, I had every permission in place, from judges, lawyers, even parents. My colleague and I were embedded in a court-mandated program in which the subjects were enrolled, and they said yes to being in the documentary. Nevertheless, I got it wrong because, as it turned out, some of the girls were not done—they were still at risk, still vulnerable to their traffickers, still living through trauma. They were in their program, still dependent on the organization whose implicit message—however unintentional—was that participation was part of recovery.
Trafficking survivors are groomed to be people pleasers as a survival mechanism. Caloca, of CAST, often works with survivors and the providers who support them in preparing to tell their stories. Consent, she said, is “about whether they can say yes and make that choice freely and understand the long-term consequences of that choice.” Baumgaertner Nunn said that she did not rely on Run 2 Rescue for access: “I object to the practice of using advocacy groups as proxies for consent,” she told CJR. “I believe there are no shortcuts to building trust, particularly with vulnerable groups.” She added, “I am still in touch with Ana, and she has repeatedly conveyed that she considers her participation in this project to be an empowering part of her own healing journey.”
Barbara Friedman, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, serves as the director of the Irina Project, which monitors media representations of sex trafficking. A recent study she coauthored with colleagues at Kent State University and CAST showed that, of forty-nine trafficking survivors surveyed, 53 percent felt pressured to share private details, 50 percent said their story was misrepresented, and 38 percent said their story was shared without their consent. “There is little doubt that these trafficking victims are recognizable to others, including their traffickers,” Friedman said. The study recommends that journalists use power-sharing models when reporting on survivors, such that sources are given meaningful agency over how their stories are told. “People think that when you share your experience, that it’s somehow life-giving, or that there are no repercussions outside of the emotional toll of telling it in the moment,” Azariah, the survivor advocate, said. “But it’s not the case at all.”
The Most Vulnerable
Typically, journalists discuss with their sources the terms of identification. Different outlets maintain different approaches to naming survivors of sexual abuse. Many news organizations grant anonymity in such cases, particularly when the individuals who have been abused are not available to speak about their experience. The Times does not allow pseudonyms, but in past coverage it has protected sources, including by identifying survivors of childhood sexual exploitation using just their initials. In the Figueroa Street story, Baumgaertner Nunn writes that “Ana’s full name, as well as those of other trafficking victims in this article, are being withheld for their safety.” But as Leslie Heimov, the executive director of the Children’s Law Center, an organization that represents dependency clients in LA County, put it, “How many Anas with no front teeth and a colostomy bag do we think there are on the Blade? I’m going with one.”
Baumgaertner Nunn identifies girls by their legal first names and their ages. Two are fifteen; another is seventeen; Ana’s younger sister, who is a minor, is woven into Ana’s story. (The Times also produced a supplementary video with original footage depicting a fourteen-year-old, who had been contacted via the internet, being detained through a sting operation and taken to a police station.) These are children who are experiencing chronic rape. Baumgaertner Nunn reports that more than half of the girls pulled from the area were in the foster care system—framed as a systemic problem, in effect a pipeline to trafficking. LA County has spent years building infrastructure to address this concern, through an anti-trafficking task force, a First Responder Protocol, and contracted service providers vetted by DCFS. Effective or not, none of that infrastructure is examined in the piece—and the story neglects to note that Run 2 Rescue was neither vetted to engage minors nor part of the protocol.
The foster system is referenced as context for vulnerability. It is also a fact with legal implications. In California, foster youth don’t simply lack adult guardians. They have an appointed network with legal standing: lawyers, social workers, judges, probation officers—all of whom are responsible for protecting children’s interests. In addition, according to California’s Local Rule 7.3(c), a journalist who will likely encounter foster youth during coverage of LA County is required to petition the juvenile court before proceeding. A petition triggers notifications to DCFS, the dependency lawyers for the county, county counsel, and parents’ counsel; they may make objections, then a judge decides and, if approved, compels all parties to cooperate. There is no indication in the story—nor any record with DCFS—that this standard was met for any of the three girls mentioned.
It may be right for journalists to be skeptical of meeting a court standard, and if Baumgaertner Nunn otherwise obtained reporting materials directly from the police, she would be well within her First Amendment rights to use them. The Times position, communicated to advocacy organizations and to CJR, was that consent had been obtained—for the reporting and for every photograph published. Even so, the journalism ethics question at hand is how material should be used. “Consent while people were being detained, pursued, and in crisis—it would be challenging to obtain meaningful consent,” Caloca said. Consider a scene in which Baumgaertner Nunn describes a seventeen-year-old meeting with an officer at the police station, “curled up with a Cup Noodles and a new teddy bear.” At one point, the officer leaves the room, as does a support volunteer who was accompanying them, Baumgaertner Nunn writes; then “the video camera kept rolling, and the girl sat quietly alone.”
Michael Nash, who served as presiding judge of the LA County Juvenile Court for fourteen years, told CJR, “A juvenile interview—recorded or not—is a juvenile record.” That typically means it cannot be shared. Over the course of his career, he worked to create a process that would allow openness to the press because, he said, “confidentiality does more to protect the system, which is far from perfect, than it does to protect the children.” As Heimov put it, “I don’t want a world where reporters think they can’t talk to kids in foster care because they’re in foster care.” The key is informed consent and consideration of potential long-term impact. It’s notable that, apart from traffickers and buyers, the LAPD sergeant who connected Ana with Forsythe is the only figure in the story who is granted anonymity.
Who Is Seen, How
The photography access offers an explanation. Grannan arrived on Figueroa Street with no prior relationship with the subjects, more than a year after Baumgaertner Nunn began her reporting. When reached to discuss the assignment, Grannan described visiting the Blade and asking several women if she could photograph them. “Some agreed and others declined,” she said. Then she went out on a ride-along, staying in a police car during stops until officers verified the ages of potential subjects and confirmed she could photograph them. “Officers assured each person they would remain anonymous and their faces would never be revealed,” Grannan said. She noted that she was assured by officers that all of her subjects were eighteen or older. But people with direct knowledge of individuals portrayed in the story say otherwise, and survivor advocates note that on-the-spot age verification checks by police cannot reliably determine a person’s status, since girls on Figueroa Street often use fake IDs to avoid being taken into the station. As Baumgaertner Nunn writes in the story, the recent change in California law has meant that, in order to bring anyone into the station, “officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage—but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell.”
Legally, on a public street, a photographer would be entitled to snap away. But Tara Pixley—a visual journalist and the director of the master’s in journalism program at Temple University, who has published extensively on journalism ethics—believes that in telling stories about vulnerable and traumatized people, especially minors, journalists need to employ an ethics-of-care framework. The way Grannan’s photographs depict girls on the Blade—including an arrest, shown first as a wide shot, and then as a close-up of handcuffs and painted nails against a girl’s barely covered behind—is problematic not just because of the content, but also its cumulative effect. “An ethics of care would push against that narrowing, asking how images might instead interrupt voyeuristic looking and expand the viewer’s moral imagination,” Pixley said. More than that, “an ethics-of-care framework in photojournalism asks us to consider how images function in the lives of real people, not only how effectively they illustrate a story. It prioritizes minimizing harm across the entire visual process: how sources are approached, how photographs are made, how images are edited, and how they ultimately circulate in public.”
That the ride-along images were almost entirely of Black and brown girls and women reflects an important reality. The story makes no mention of it, however, nor does it ask about the underlying reasons. “There was not even a mention of the systemic factors that create vulnerabilities,” Rhonelle Bruder—a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, currently a teaching fellow at Harvard, focused on gender-based violence and human trafficking—said. “Black girls and girls of color are disproportionately sex-trafficked. We’re not talking about why. It’s just about them girls.” Dom, someone I met making Very Young Girls, was twelve when she was first trafficked. When I showed her the Figueroa Street story, she smirked, then chuckled. Then she pointed to the pictures, and yelled: “I hate these! They can’t do something else?”
When asked about the images in the Figueroa Street story, Grannan said, “My mission here was to visually document the reality of the young women who are visible in plain sight.” She noted that this was her first police ride-along, said that she does not consider herself a photojournalist, and described “conflicted feelings about the process, since prior to this story, I have always photographed and filmed people who gave explicit consent.” In a subsequent email, she wrote, “The magazine applied extraordinary support and care to this story—more than any other I’ve worked on with them in over twenty years” and said that she sought guidance from an experienced photojournalist, spoke with the reporter, and consulted with the LAPD vice unit sergeant and Forsythe.
Together, the images echo tropes that have long been used to justify the policing of trafficked people, particularly young women and girls of color. “It is always the bodies of young Black women that are plastered all over the internet so that legislators can pass more laws that increase policing of these same communities,” Leigh LaChapelle, the director of policy and advocacy at CAST, said. “It is a vicious cycle.”
Alternatives
In 2020, when Karen de Sá became the executive editor of The Imprint, a nonprofit digital publication, she brought more than two decades of experience leading investigative reporting on child welfare for the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. At The Imprint, before any story involving a child currently in the system is published, at least one member of that child’s legal-protection network—a lawyer, social worker, judge, probation officer—is contacted and their involvement confirmed. For adults, she set another standard: even willing subjects who were abused as children cannot be named without editorial discussion. And crucially, The Imprint practices a “no surprises” policy, requiring reporters and editors to walk story subjects through every passage describing them before publication. Subjects also have the right to change their minds about their participation.
Cathy Otten, a British journalist who spent years in Iraqi Kurdistan reporting on Yezidi women enslaved by ISIS, has worked through questions of consent and duty of care in her teaching and her reporting. Consent, she said, is an “ongoing conversation”—not a “yes” in the moment when approached by an officer, fixer, NGO, or authority figure. In practice, for her, consent means being explicit at the outset that she is a journalist and making clear where exactly the work will appear, in what language, on what platforms, and what she cannot promise in return. It includes a frank discussion on risks, contemporary and long-term. She uses pseudonyms as a blanket policy and asks survivors to choose their own.
Otten acknowledged that it isn’t easy to execute any of this in the field, on deadline. Even the most careful reporters, she said, can “get pulled along” by the trauma narrative or the rescue arc. “We’ve all fallen for that,” she said, “as filmmakers, photographers, writers.” Otten believes that “do no harm” might be too lofty a goal, because “human interactions are fraught.” The standard isn’t perfection, but rather a discipline not to make life worse for the people trusting you with their stories.
