I have been conducting empirical research on child trafficking in the United States ever since the passage of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. I began by "studying up": 1 looking at existing decision-makers, policies, and programs set up to prevent child trafficking, protect trafficked children, and prosecute perpetrators. Access to trafficked children and adolescents, guarded by their protectors almost as closely as by their traffickers, was impossible and research funds scarce; most of the money appropriated by the U.S. Congress for anti-trafficking activities was spent on direct services to victims or information campaigns. Later on, as I gained trust of service providers, I was slowly able to meet a few survivors of child trafficking and begin "studying down": examining the perspectives of survivors of child trafficking, analyzing the meaning they ascribe to their trafficking experiences, and identifying the matters that concern them as they rebuild their lives in America. In 2005, I received a grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and started interviewing survivors of child trafficking and their helpers in earnest. This research has served as a springboard for a book project on survivors of child trafficking (Goździak, 2016). At the time of my first foray into the field of child trafficking, the anti-trafficking efforts focused solely on foreign-born victims of child (and adult) trafficking. Under federal law, enshrined in the TVPA, child victims of severe forms of human trafficking were defined as individuals under 18 years of age who have been induced to perform commercial sex acts or have been recruited, harbored, transported, provided, or obtained for labor or services through the use of "force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude" (DOS, 2000). While the TVPA of 2000 was silent on the issue of victims' place of birth, the assumption was that the law was created to provide services and benefits to undocumented victims who otherwise might have been simply deported. It was presumed that U.S. citizens and other lawful residents already had access to state and federal programs unavailable to their undocumented counterparts (Carr, 2012). However, by late 2005, human rights and child advocates started expanding the category of trafficked children. Victims of child trafficking were no longer limited to foreign-born minors trafficked across international borders. "Advocates argued that there was a class of domestic trafficking victims: U.S. citizens and residents who travelled inside national borders as forced laborersinvariably young people and children used for sex" (DeStefano, 2008, p. 12). As a result of these advocacy efforts, the TVPA was amended in 2008 to include domestic trafficking victims: U.S. citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs). This cohort is comprised mainly of persons whom we used to call commercially sexually exploited children (CSEC). More recently, this phenomenon is referred to as "domestic minor sex traff...