Kanisha Hamilton became an expert on sex trafficking the hard way, beginning at the age of 12. So whenever she heard talk about the Jeffrey Epstein case, “it triggered me bad,” she recalled.

“I would wake up in the mornings and think about something that had to do with it, and just start crying uncontrollably,” she told me. “Because I knew there are thousands if not more women, children and even men suffering at that moment. And everyone else in the world is just going about their business acting like they can’t do anything.”

“That’s how people like that get away with sex trafficking people,” she said.

One of the paradoxes of the moment is that there is intense outrage at Epstein and his enablers — as there should be — but almost no effort to protect the girls or boys who continue to be trafficked all around the country and the world. We are rightly appalled at the general indifference that powerful figures showed toward Epstein’s assaults, yet collectively we show a parallel indifference to the predation that continues to unfold in cheap motels everywhere. The upshot is that exploitation of girls and boys continues daily at thousands of times the scale of anything Epstein did.

Hamilton’s pathway began when she was around 6 months old and her mother, who was addicted to drugs, was murdered, she said. Her grandmother then traded her to a child molester for heroin, she said, and after enduring abuse she ended up in the dysfunctional world of foster care. At 12 she joined her dad, a pimp who began selling her as well as the other women he controlled, she added.

We sometimes imagine that traffickers jump out of bushes, grab teenage girls and drag them into vans, to be chained to radiators. But I’ve been writing about trafficking for more than 25 years, and mostly the traffickers prey on girls who are already vulnerable. In need of housing, food or love, these girls are too often invisible to society — but not to pimps.

“There’s just an overall misconception of what trafficking is, what it looks like,” said Felicia Bowman, who was trafficked at the age of 7 by a friend’s brother who was also a drug dealer. “People think that it’s a white van, it’s the zip ties on your car at Target.” She was referring to an urban legend that traffickers drive white commercial vans to kidnap girls, and mark kidnapping targets with zip ties.

“How do we hold the fact that it’s all these vulnerabilities that we’re not addressing?” she added. “Because then we’re all accountable, and we’re all responsible, and a lot of the problems that lead to that are so big.”

Bowman had those vulnerabilities. A female family friend who watched over her took advantage of them and sold her for sex, she said. “She was making me sleep with people for money for drugs,” Bowman recalled.

It’s not just that we don’t try to help these children. Often, we scorn them. We see them as bad kids, as troublemakers, as runaways, and we are lenient to those who abuse them.

Bowman says that when she was 12, a man was arrested for sexually assaulting her. “He was found guilty,” she said. “He got 30 days.” Records document that.

I asked her if any mandatory reporters — teachers or doctors, for example — had seen evidence of her abuse and reported it to the authorities. On the contrary, she said, authorities who should have been looking out for her also abused her. One was caught and convicted, but his only punishment was house arrest.

It’s no wonder that Bowman didn’t trust authority figures. All they did was exploit her.

I met Bowman and Hamilton through an impressive nonprofit called Dragonfly that serves trafficking survivors in Oklahoma. These local initiatives, offering everything from therapy to medical care to removal of pimp tattoos, are invaluable — but they are starved of resources. When a girl leaves a pimp, it can be a scramble to find a bed for her.

When help comes, it can be transformative. Both Hamilton and Bowman are now thriving and helping other survivors of human trafficking.

“We’re underfunded, and the demand is insane for our services,” said Whitney Anderson, a founder of Dragonfly. “What keeps us going is that these are individuals who have survived the worst of the worst. That they have seen things done to them that humans should never do, and they are in front of us. And so we owe them the very best.”

If we were serious about confronting trafficking, we could boost support for these programs around the country. We could shut down websites where pimps advertise girls (and sometimes boys), as prosecutors did with Backpage, which once dominated the field. We could insist that social media platforms crack down on traffickers who recruit on their pages using coded language (if 14-year-olds understand it, the companies can as well). We could make much greater efforts to prosecute pimps. And local D.A.s could prosecute johns to suppress the demand that keeps traffickers in business.

Most of all, we could do more to help families and children so that they’re not in the pipeline to be trafficked. Girls in foster care are at particular risk; there are no statistics on this, but after decades of these interviews I wouldn’t be surprised if a girl in foster care is more likely to end up trafficked than to graduate from a four-year college.

Yet instead of helping these vulnerable children, we’re magnifying the risks. President Trump’s cuts in social services, such as for mental health and addiction treatment, may lead to more disadvantaged and chaotic homes and more trafficked children.

I’m on my annual “win a trip” journey, in which I pick a university student to travel on a reporting trip with me — this year, it’s Brunella Tipismana of Yale — and in Tulsa, we visited an outstanding pre-K system called Educare serving the neediest families. Educare seems to me a tool to build resiliency, improve outcomes and reduce addiction and trafficking, yet America has never been willing to invest in high-quality pre-K for the kids who most need it.

In Kentucky, we visited Freedom House, which helps moms overcoming addiction. If we were serious about trafficking we would make such programs much more broadly available. But addiction treatment is underfunded in America, and Trump’s Medicaid cuts next January will make the problem worse.

My quarrel with conservatives is that they defund programs that can, imperfectly, reduce the number of children vulnerable to exploitation. My quarrel with liberals is that they sometimes are so nonjudgmental that they favor legalizing sex work in ways that would also permit pimping (anyone who thinks pimps are business partners of girls doesn’t understand the trade). My quarrel with the public is that our fury at Epstein’s friends seems performative if in effect we shrug at children being sold for sex down the street.

Consider Cassidy Husband, who grew up in a dysfunctional home and ran away at the age of 13 into the arms of a pimp who said he loved her — and then started selling her. Now 29, she recalled working for many different pimps over the next 14 years, and they always kept the money. They often assigned her daily earnings quotas, and she risked a beating if she fell short. Her body is marked by tattoos from pimps trying to establish their ownership over her.

In her years on the street, Husband said she regularly recruited girls for her pimps. She looked for girls with broken sandals, or unkempt clothes or hair, who lacked confidence. “Come on,” she would tell the girl, “and we’re going to take care of you.” It was emotional manipulation of desperate, vulnerable young women, but it was not the kind of kidnapping that the public associates with human trafficking.

“It’s really hard to bring awareness, I think, about child sex trafficking,” said Husband, who is now off drugs, getting her tattoos removed and rebuilding her life. “Because a bag didn’t get put over my head. I didn’t get shoved into a van, that kind of thing.”

If we truly think that Epstein was a monster, then what’s needed isn’t shaking our fists at his corpse. It’s a real effort to help the girls and boys who, in cities around the country, are struggling in chaotic homes, desperate for help and not getting any at all.