How does a teenager fall prey to sex trafficking not once, but twice, and perhaps three times – all while under the legal protection of Oregon’s foster care system?
That’s the question reporter Hillary Borrud set out to answer in her exhaustive investigation, “Sold for Sex.” It not only uncovered repeated failures by state government to protect the vulnerable teen, beginning from the day she was born, but also revealed federal inaction to more effectively quantify how often foster kids are trafficked for sex nationally.
Borrud heard about Grace in 2018, when she covered Oregon’s governor and state politics. Grace’s biological mother began emailing the newsroom with shocking tales of her 14-year-old daughter flying to Texas by herself, fleeing from the foster system repeatedly, going missing with grown men for months at a time and being the victim of sex trafficking.
But state officials won’t talk about foster kids, the state’s child welfare system is largely impenetrable to public records requests, and prosecutors for years never charged anyone with a crime tied to Grace. So Borrud watched and waited.
When she joined the investigative team in 2023, the landscape had changed. By then, two men had been criminally charged with promoting or compelling Grace into prostitution, with one case unresolved. Grace was now an adult, with a young daughter of her own. And, crucially, she was willing to share her story – and Borrud was able to obtain internal state records to contextualize how the system had repeatedly failed Grace.
Victims of sexual exploitation often come from marginalized and underrepresented communities who face systemic inequities, and that was true in Grace’s case. One federal report found that about 40% of surveyed foster youth were alleged to have been trafficked or self-reported a trafficking experience, most of which involved sex trafficking. A different Congressional report found that Black children made up more than half of all juvenile prostitution arrests and 40% of sex trafficking victims were identified as Black women. Grace is biracial, with a Black father and white mother, and she struggled in childhood to find culturally appropriate help from her mother and within the foster system.
In the end, Borrud delivered a uniquely powerful investigation into the known problem of sex trafficking of foster children. Unlike other stories on the issue, however, Borrud seamlessly wove together a deeply reported personal narrative with crucial exposition so readers could understand how various state and federal failures allowed Grace and others to fall through the cracks.
The report runs some 6,500 words. The online presentation by Mark Friesen strays from typical stories on OregonLive.com and uses a special desktop configuration to allow for extra-large imagery. The package features a dozen compelling and often-intimate portraits made by staff photographer Beth Nakamura. And it includes an assortment of videos, edited by Teresa Mahoney, that play when readers reach key points in the story, so they can hear directly from Grace as she describes all she’s endured and overcome.
