When Anh was 5, her impoverished parents sold her for $50.

Her purchaser took her from her remote northern village to Bangkok, where she became a domestic slave. At age 11, after being sexually abused by the man of the house, she ran away. A kindly woman offered her help, then sold her into the sex trade for $250.

It took Anh 10 years as a prostitute to work that debt off, then she was lured into being a bar girl. When she was 36, she was rescued from the sex industry by Angel Eyes, a group combating human trafficking. Because she had been betrayed so often, it took Angel Eyes workers a year to gain her trust. Today, she works with the group.

A horrible story, yes, but it happened halfway around the world.

But it’s also close to home, said Mark Elam, of Oklahomans Against the Trafficking of Humans and Angel Eyes International.

Elam spoke at Northeastern State University Thursday evening, in a presentation sponsored by the NSU National Association of Student Social Workers and Beta Sigma Phi Mu Omega Tahlequah Chapter.

Take the 14-year-old all-American girl, one of several sexual exploitation survivors interviewed on a video Elam showed. She turned her first trick at age 11.

“I wanted to feel loved. I wanted to feel important,” she said, explaining why she sold herself to men.

Another girl, 13, told about how she and her counterparts climbed a fence into a truck stop on Interstate 35 (it was difficult to scale the fence in high heels), and offered themselves to 30 or 40 truckers.

While the girl was busy satisfying the trucker who had chosen her, her friend looked through the man’s wallet. She found photos of his grandchildren, who were about the same age as the girls. It sickened them. The girl sobbed as she related the story.

Yet another girl spoke of what she went through at age 12.

“I would sell myself for the smallest of things, just to get a place to sleep for the night,” she said.

With one example after another, one tragic story after another, Elam drove home his points about human trafficking.

“The average age of prostitution around the world now is 14. The average entry age is 12,” he said.

A number of years ago, the average prostitute was in her late teens or early 20s, he said.

Human trafficking can involve various forms — forced labor in factories, in agriculture, in sweatshops, as domestic servants. But it increasingly is part of the sex trade, and involves younger and younger children.

Men go for the younger children, hoping they will not yet have contracted HIV or AIDS, Elam said. In Southeast Asia, 40 to 45 percent of the girls rescued by Angel Eyes already have HIV. In Africa, it’s as high as 50 percent.

Most people think Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in this country, that it no longer exists around the world, or is at most a minor problem.

“There are more slaves alive today than ever before,” Elam said. “Eighty percent of them are women and half are children.”

Most of the women and children are in the sex market, he said.

He said in Thailand and other Asian countries, poor villagers frequently sell the oldest daughter into sexual slavery, using the money to finance her brothers’ education, since girls are not considered worth educating. Because of strong family loyalty, she is taught to take pride in helping her family. At the same time, there is a stigma for what she was forced to do.

When she has children, they will be raised in the red light district and likely follow in her footsteps.

In Eastern Europe, the Russian Mafia has taken the lead in female exploitation, Elam said. And they’re not so tolerant of children. Many of the Eastern European sex slaves Angel Eyes has rescued have been forced to have 30 or 40 abortions, some as many as 50 or 60 during their careers.

But just as it takes two to tango, there would be no demand for sex slaves if there wasn’t a steady stream of customers. At home, as well as abroad, American men are ready to pay money for sex. Bangkok thrives on the sex industry from customers who come from throughout the world, including Americans.

And wherever American and other military bases have been established, there are plenty of bars and brothels in the area, Elam said.

After all, the grandfatherly trucker the 13-year-old had as a customer was an American.

Elam said the business isn’t just something that takes place in the big cities and along the coasts, but also predominates in the Bible belt.

“America is now the No. 1 destination among international immigrants in the world,” he said.

Houston is the No. 1 port for these immigrant slaves, who are dispersed through the country via the major interstate routes. Interstate 35, running through Oklahoma, is a prime route.

“In 2004, we [Oklahoma] were listed the top four site in this problem,” Elam said. “Now we’re about number seven, and we’re always going to be listed in the top 10.”

He said law enforcement officials are just now scratching the surface in dealing with the problem.

Elam believes to combat sex slavery it is essential to prosecute the pimps who profit from the victims’ work. Pimping was, for many years, an attractive option for inner city young men who saw their peers who sold drugs arrested and given lengthy prison terms. If arrested, the pimps faced only misdemeanor charges for their offenses.

But in recent years, through FBI crackdowns, 300 to 400 of these pimps are serving significant time in the federal penitentiary for their role in human trafficking.

Elam said the young women involved frequently were sexually abused at home before running away and becoming victims of pimps, thus entering the sex trade unwillingly. Unfortunately, many of these young women insist, when first confronted, that they are not victims and that their exploiters are their “boyfriends,” even when that “boyfriend” has just badly beaten them.

There are few rehab programs for these girls, and they don’t last long enough, Elam said. Even with three to five years of treatment, there is only a 40 percent success rate. After brief periods of treatment, 97 percent of the girls return to the street.

An increasing amount of human trafficking, especially prostitution, operates in conjunction with Mexican and Asian restaurants, and through motels owned by immigrants from India, Elam said. Exploiters also are increasingly using the Internet as a recruiting tool.

“It’s unbelievable what’s going on under the radar, through Internet chat rooms, in the after-hours parties,” he said.

It’s happening close to home, as Elam said earlier.

In August, Ronnie Presley, 35, was arrested in Muskogee in connection with one of the largest human sex-trafficking roundups in history. The group ran young women between Houston, Las Vegas and other major cities.

From media reports, many people may believe that Presley’s apprehension locally was only a coincidence, but that’s not the case, Elam said.

“Presley has residences in Wichita and in Tulsa, and family in Muskogee,” he said.

“Our intelligence was that he was working Oklahoma City and Tulsa, we don’t know about Muskogee, but he was caught in Muskogee.”

And what of a young woman Presley was accused of assaulting and beating at the time of his arrest? She told police he was her “boyfriend.”