When people hear the phrase “sex trafficking,” the St. Louis area probably isn’t the first location to come to mind.

It certainly wasn’t for Waterloo resident Dedee Lhamon, who saw a documentary in 2008 that shocked her.

“It talked about international trafficking in Cambodia and Thailand and then switched focus to domestic sex trafficking of children,” Lhamon said. “I have two daughters and had never even considered the fact that this could be happening in the United States, much less in the area.”

Lhamon finished up her projects and trainings with her job in internal business communications and began researching sex trafficking in the area.

“I spent a year going to conferences and talking to people locally,” she said. “The issue is significant in the St. Louis area.”

Lhamon founded The Covering House, a non-profit organization in St. Louis to provide resources and refuge for young girls who have been trafficked.

She said the FBI reports that there are up to 300,000 child prostitutes in the U.S. today, and that number is growing daily.

Sex trafficking, by definition, is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age.

For the first three years after The Covering House had been established, Lhamon and her board worked to raise awareness and funds in the St. Louis area.

“All of our clients are domestic,” she said. “I didn’t realize at the time (that we started) that St. Louis is ranked in the top 20 cities in the nation for sex trafficking.”

According to the information packet issued by The Covering House, parts of St. Louis  — such as just across the river near Sauget — are full of strip clubs, so much so it is even considered a “red light district.”

St. Louis County is also known to have a thriving Internet sex trade industry.

Lhamon said she thought initially that the children who are involved in sex trafficking didn’t have caring adults in their lives or were runaways.

“That’s nowhere near the case,” she said. “We’ve had two fathers come and rescue their own children. We’ve had multiple parents or caretakers actively involved in their childrens’ lives. It happens to families who have strong family units.”

She said they have had girls from suburbs and small towns, dispelling the myth that sex trafficking is only an inner-city problem.

A lot of times the children are not trafficked by a pimp, but rather somebody they know.

“It could be a family member trafficking them for drug money,” she said. “It’s broader than we think.”

Since January 2013, The Covering House has helped 26 girls locally and has been instrumental in providing resources for 24 girls nationwide.

“We get calls from all over the country, so we try to connect them with resources,” Lhamon said.

There’s no “quick fix” to helping the girls who have been put through the trauma of being trafficked, Lhamon said, and every case is different and complex.

“We’re in it for the long haul with these girls,” she said.

Though there are only 37 residential programs nationally that provide shelter for the survivors, The Covering House changed that in September with the addition of a 38th facility, a long-term therapeutic home in Missouri.

“It is my desire to help these girls have the opportunity to regain some of their childhood which was ripped from them,” she said in the press release about the new facility. “The journey to healing will be hard, but we understand that a long-term investment is needed for success.”

To learn more about The Covering House, visit www.thecoveringhouse.org.