White Slavery, 1972

Hands in her pockets, tossing her stringy blonde curls, Chickie stood on a street corner in Manhattan's East Village and talked about her bizarre introduction to the oldest profession. "I was grabbed in a store by this guy and this chick who said they were taking me for a ride," she said offhandedly. "They said they wanted me to meet a friend. He was a pimp. They sold me to him for $100. He locked me up in this hotel room and ran in cheap tricks —$10. Old white guys, Chinamen, foreigners. I got away after a week, but he followed me and gave me a line I fell for, so I went back with him. He grabbed my hair, so I kicked him between the legs—boom! He called in another guy and they took my clothes off. They began to heat up this coat hanger with matches and burn my ass with it. Then the pimp put his foot on my face and stomped it. I figured, well, you've got to take some bad things in life." Chickie was 14.

Teeny-Hookers. The idea of white slavery sounds as remote as the atria of ancient Rome or the tents of Saladin, but it is an appalling fact of life in today's East Village. Once a colorful and relatively innocuous capital of the young American counterculture, the East Village has declined precipitately in recent years. The flower people of the late 1960s, mostly middle-class kids trying to create a gaudy secular religion, have given way to a desperate culture of emotionally troubled rejects, largely from working-class and even ghetto families. Amphetamines, heroin and old-fashioned alcohol have generally replaced pot and LSD; violence has supplanted Aquarian love. Now the area is open to the professional pimp, who uses a combination of terrorism, drugs and ersatz affection to lure confused teen-age girls into prostitution. The teeny-hookers have created a glut on the market, sneers a tough old pro of 20. "They want to set the world on fire —and they ain't even got their period yet."

No one knows how many young girls flock to the Village each year; estimates range up to 500 or higher. About 80% are white, and most are from out of state. The girls are easy pickings for the alert, dapper, slick-talking pimps, who find them around hamburger joints, huddled in doorways, cruising Washington Square Park on Sundays. Some even get picked up on arrival at the Port Authority bus terminal. Sometimes the girls are kidnaped outright, like Chickie. More often they are hungry, discouraged, possibly drug-addicted, ready for the smooth stud in the broad-brimmed hat whispering promises of food, shelter, drugs and his special brand of love.

This latter-day version of the white-slave trade—the pimps themselves call it that—is already building to its annual summer peak. One of the pimps, a lean, 23-year-old Viet Nam veteran, sipped his beer in a Third Avenue dive and explained his recruitment and training program to TIME Correspondent James Willwerth: "She just walked up to me and my partner in Washington Square and we started talking. My partner is 'processing' her now. You've got to find out if they've got problems, if they're smart enough to say they are 18 when the cops make a bust. The majority of girls I've gotten so far got raped by fathers or uncles or somebody."