Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news!

Add free listening on Amazon Music is included with your Prime Membership.

Ads shouldn't be the scariest thing about true crime podcasts.

To start listening, download the Amazon Music app or visit amazon.co.uk forward slash true crime ad free.

That's amazon.co.uk forward slash true crime ad free to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackerson here. Welcome to another edition of full measure after hours.

Today, I weed through a lot of claims and information about child abuse and child sex trafficking in the US and Hollywood.

I finally got around to looking into a very, very important story that I've been thinking about for a long time.

Because after I interview different people, whether they are attorneys who work on interesting provocative topics

or law enforcement people, I've been asking in the past couple of years,

what are some of the biggest stories they think are not getting the right amount of coverage in terms of how important they are?

And one after another has been telling me child sex trafficking in the US.

Sometimes it's as it relates to the illegal trafficking across our southern border, which heavily involves child trafficking.

But also just in general, the problem of child abuse and child sex trafficking here in the United States.

Working on a story in Southern California about two years ago, I was speaking to an expert on this topic who said,

gangs recruit children in school, particularly some of these gangs that come across our southern border and get into our middle schools and high schools.

They understand how to groom and recruit young girls.

And the girls end up in a sex trafficking ring and they're used as currency by these gangs across the country.

There are also problems as you hear in just a moment with people that are not connected to gangs trafficking in children.

Sometimes they're own relatives, sometimes they're own parents.

And it's apparently way more common than any of us like to think about.

But another reason I wanted to look into this topic is that if you've noticed in media coverage,

...