Mimi's on the run. After five years of being whipped with burning wire, pummeled by bare fists and having her skull repeatedly smashed into concrete, the childlike 20-year-old--who's had nearly 30 pimps since she was 15--is running as fast as she can from a life inside the teen-sex industry.

Two months into her escape, she remains in hiding in New Jersey. If a former pimp catches up with her, she could be killed. Mimi hopes to find salvation in Philadelphia, at a safe haven called Dawn's Place.

Right now Dawn's Place isn't fully functional. The building is purchased and painted and permits are secured, but the board of directors is still seeking sustainable funding for its mission. But that mission is essential, because for girls like Mimi, the commercial sex industry is easy to fall into but notoriously hard to escape.

The vision is that Dawn's Place will serve as an emergency hideout for girls on the run. Once it's fully staffed, it'll help women and girls like Mimi sort out the psychological, emotional and financial wreckage that are the obstacles to real recovery. Clients will commit to live for one full year at Dawn's, which will hopefully be enough time to right the wrongs done to them. Under the direction of local expert Donna Sabella, the counseling program will be designed to dissolve the trauma that psychologically enslaves such women and girls long after they have their bodies back.

Dawn's Place will be one of a handful of recovery programs of its kind in the country, and will bring Philadelphia to the progressive forefront of the global battle against human trafficking. The program is modeled after Dignity House in Phoenix, Az., a recovery program created by sex-industry survivor/activist Kathleen Mitchell, a mentor of Sabella's.

If Mimi had been allowed to keep any of the money she made from all those men, she could finance Dawn's Place herself. She estimates she earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for her pimps.

"It sucked," she says now. "Even though I got clothes, got whatever I wanted, I couldn't be free. When you're in the game, you're a kid, always dependent on other people. You can't depend on yourself. You have to go out, meet certain people and get money off them. You're never in control. Never."

Mimi escaped with a mere $30. And now money's the reason she can't move to Philly to start a new life. In the meantime, she keeps a low profile--her mom won't let her back in the house--and waits for the next phase of her young life to begin.

The international pandemic of trafficking is gaining more attention in the U.S. thanks to the efforts of high-profile abolitionists like New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof and a rash of new books and documentaries. Organizational membership in Philadelphia's Coalition Against Human Trafficking mushroomed in the last year.

Last week the United Nations issued a report, "Global Report on Trafficking in Persons," that estimated 79 percent of human trafficking takes place within the commercial sex industry. But as awareness builds and legislation tries to catch up with the problem, girls like Mimi still have few places to go.

And stories like hers are becoming all too common. Often, young girls are kidnapped, gagged or drugged and then kept in brothels to "work" as sex slaves. It's estimated that 60 percent of workers in the commercial sex industry are slaves. Only 2 percent of commercial sex workers do such work voluntarily. The remaining 38 percent fall into a gray area that's further confused by the young age of the average victim, the inherent exploitation and the strategic recruitment employed by pimps.

The U.S. is primarily a destination for kids trafficked from abroad. In Philadelphia alone, there are roughly 70 sites under suspicion for housing sex slaves. Because these children are generally kept in brothels, have language barriers and fear for their lives--trafficked kids are frequently told their families back home will be killed if they escape--workers in the field say it's very difficult to reach them.

But Mimi's story is different. As an American citizen, she was trafficked domestically, and girls like her are on street corners everywhere. She's part of the street-level commercial sex-for-sale system, or what insiders call "the game."

The game preys on kids. The average age a prostitute in the U.S. starts working is 12 or 13. Some research skews the age even younger.

Sitting in a room in New Jersey, chaperoned by her caseworker, Mimi prepares to recount her story for Sabella, who was once a teenage go-go dancer in a club in Bucks County. She's now a mental health nurse and a professor at three universities and she's documenting Mimi's story for her doctoral thesis. She'll use the recording for insight as she develops the counseling program that will be used at Dawn's Place.

Mimi takes a deep breath.

"Where do you want to begin?" she asks politely. "It depends where you want to begin."

Mimi remembers little about her early years beyond playing in the ice and snow with the other kids, and that it was always freezing, and the one best friend she left behind was named Ana. She's nagged by the feeling that "a lot of stuff" happened to her in Russia, though she adds that if she was sexually abused as a baby, she doesn't remember it.

"I have scars on my butt, like deep indentation scars. It was a knife, and I don't know what that's from. My parents don't know what that's from [either]," she says. "The adoption people never said nothing about it. They just said, 'She was born like that.' But I don't think so."

As an adolescent, Mimi didn't get along well with her parents.

"They're older, so they were very strict when they raised me," she explains. "I couldn't do nothing. Like literally, nothing."

At 15, she met an older guy on a Nextel push-to-talk phone line, hopped on a bus and headed west. It was a decision that put her life in a tailspin.

Her 25-year-old boyfriend's dope-dealing mother and grandmother pressured Mimi into prostitution. The duo told the young girl that if she wanted to continue living in their house, she had to pay their rent.

"I was like, 'What do you mean?'" says Mimi. "It was weird. I was like, 'What do you want me to do?' I didn't know what they wanted me to do."

Thousands of miles from home and with nowhere to go, Mimi turned her first trick.

But things didn't work out--Mimi's boyfriend got another 15-year-old girl pregnant--so she returned to her family in Jersey, earned a GED and generally stayed out of trouble. But, Mimi says, "Things didn't work out." Soon enough, she ran away again.

"I left again and just kept going back to the streets," she says. "At the time, I just wanted--I felt comfort in the streets. Like I was protected."

That feeling disappeared. Soon, Mimi met pimps who said they wanted to protect her, but instead hurt her badly.

There was the guy who favored punishment by the classic "pimpstick"--he untangled a wire hanger, heated it with fire until it glowed red, and then whipped Mimi with it. Mimi still has the scars.

"Over a Social Security card, too," she says, remembering her surprise. "That was so dumb."

What she didn't realize was that to pimps and traffickers, securing an ID isn't dumb at all. It's a standard practice to take all forms of identification from their underage victims and either hold them or sell them on the black market. Mimi's Social Security card, birth certificate and passport were taken. Her birth certificate was sold for $500.

When Mimi starts talking about a puppy that was in the room while her ex-pimp was whipping her with the burning wire, she gets a goofy smile on her face.

"I thought it was cute, the little puppy. He was barking at him, trying to bite him," she says. "That little puppy, trying to save me!"

After the beating, Mimi tried to escape by running through the woods. But there was a fence, and she didn't get over it in time. A rival girl from the stable grabbed her and beat her up. She was dragged back to the pimp.

Looking at Mimi, it's disturbingly obvious why pimps repeatedly recruited her.

Mimi's got a child's frame and a very pretty baby-face--she looks barely 13 in her blonde ponytail and dangly silver heart earrings. About 5 feet tall, she has the polite demeanor of the baby-sitter next door. The thin strokes of black liner that rim her eyes and white frosty eye shadow smudged across her brow bone make her eyes look as big as a Japanimation character.

How long can a girl like Mimi walk down a city street before a car pulls over and a pimp tries to get her in? "Fifteen, 20 minutes," she says.

It's hard to imagine Mimi working 20 hours a day turning tricks in cars and hotel rooms with strange and sometimes violent men--never mind at 15 when she must have looked even younger.

As Mimi tells her story, the need for Dawn's Place becomes more clear. Getting away from a pimp is only the first part in a long journey of recovery. Studies show that the persistent lack of autonomy, violence and fear leads to post-traumatic stress disorder for 68 percent of prostitutes. Sometimes Mimi will see a guy who looks like the man who broke her nose then tried to force his penis into her bloody mouth and she panics, and once again feels the urge to run.

In 2000, the Victims of Violence and Traffic Act (PDF) finally made the human trafficking of people born in foreign countries on American soil illegal. Under this law, when foreign-born girls are discovered being abused in the commercial sex industry, they're recognized as victims and protected by the Department of Health and Human Services. If they meet the requirements, are willing to assist in the investigation of traffickers and have applied for a temporary visa (or are approved by the Department of Homeland Security), they're extended the same benefits as refugees.

A couple months ago, five young Liberian sex slaves were discovered living in a house in Upper Darby. After they were found, four of the five girls were placed in protective care. The fifth girl disappeared.

But when sexually exploited American children are discovered, they don't get certified; they get arrested and branded as willing participants of the sex trade. A criminal record piled on top systemized physical and psychological trauma makes it highly unlikely for domestic sex slaves to lead a normal life.

So far, one state has taken a first stride toward helping American-born children who are exploited in the sex trade. Last June New York State passed the Safe Harbor Act, which will "create a presumption that a person under 16 years of age who is charged as a juvenile delinquent for a prostitution offense is a severely trafficked person." It's currently waiting to be signed by the governor and is scheduled to take effect by April 2010. According to Gov. Rendell's office, Pennsylvania doesn't have any such law in the works.

In the eyes of the law, girls like Mimi are seen as criminals. Yet the traffickers' and street pimps' methods of recruitment and retention--targeting the youngest kids with the least resources, stealing and withholding ID documents, and the ancient slave-keeping strategy of debt bondage--are often identical, whether the girls are foreign-born or American.

According to one study, 62 percent of "prostitutes" report having been raped, 73 percent report getting beat up and 72 percent being otherwise homeless. Forty-eight percent confess to being raped at least five times. Research shows 90 to 92 percent of people selling their bodies on the street want to get out.

In Philly, the average prostitute is dead by 40. (PDF) But by opening Dawn's Place and creating a counseling model that deals with the reverberations of the trauma of prostitution, Sabella is determined to help refugees of the game escape and heal. These girls will learn how to survive outside of the sex trade and even examine where age and circumstance blurs the concept of choice.

For Mimi, the urgency of getting into Dawn's Place is palpable. "I know if he ever found me, I would die," she says, referring to one of her ex-pimps. "He would kill me."

Once she realized what their common experiences were, she says, it didn't make any sense, from a psychological standpoint, to continue counseling them without directly addressing the trauma experienced during prostitution.

"This one woman in particular, she was beaten up and she said something about her 'Daddy,' and I was like, 'Daddy?' Then the light bulb went off."

The abusive relationship between pimp and prostitute--or trafficker and victim--can be one of the biggest retention tools. The dynamic between very young girls like Mimi and older predator pimps is especially problematic. To them, the thinly veiled abuse can feel a lot like love.

Allegiance to a long-term pimp is part of the psychological phenomenon that makes kids so susceptible to predators in the game.

"You're with a certain guy and you're with him a long time, like two or three years. And you want to get out of the game but you can't, because you're in love. At the end of the day, you are in love with this guy," she says. "You're strong, you've got a strong will about yourself to go out every night, sell your pussy and then come home and give all the money you made to that guy."

It's called trauma bonds, a severe attachment disorder most common among abused and neglected children. It results in a tendency to avoid or resist their mothers and to show loyalty to abusers. It's one of the psychological concepts that counselors at Dawn's Place plan to address.

When Mimi finally got on the bus back to New Jersey two months ago, she wasn't just leaving the streets or the game or prostitution behind. It's hard for people--squares, as she calls outsiders--to understand, but in her mind she was leaving a boyfriend behind, too.

The last couple of years she was on the street she worked for a guy she calls S. He started out acting like a boyfriend. This is a common strategy that older male pimps employ to recruit younger girls. It's called "the loverboy phenomenon."

When Mimi talks about S., her voice softens and she looks at the ground and plays with her fingers. She looks and sounds like any other heartbroken teenager having a hard time believing her boyfriend is such an asshole.

"He was so great. He was so cute. I found him so attractive and he was so caring. That's how I felt," she says, about their courtship.

Then reality set in, and he made her work with a fever until she collapsed, hit her a few times and started getting "jealous and weird."

When she was almost murdered by a crazy trick, and was hurt so badly it looked like she wouldn't be able to earn for a little while, S. stopped even pretending to care.

Mimi says she sensed something was wrong when she went with that trick, but she got in the car anyway. The guy started to drive and refused to "handle business," which means to pay. Then he broke her nose with his fist, yanked his penis out and tried to force it into her bloody mouth by pulling her hair. All while the car was going 40, 45 miles per hour.

"He started reaching to the side. I didn't know if he was going to pull out a knife, a gun, whatever. He could've pulled out anything. I thought, 'Either I'm going to live or I'm going to die,'" she says. "I opened the car door while he was driving and jumped out."

Two girls about her age saw her body tumble across the road and ran over to help her. Her nose was broken, her arm fractured and her skin road-rashed and cut up. There was blood everywhere. She remembers feeling the convulsions of a seizure beginning. She woke up in the hospital with her arm in a sling and bandaged all over.

S. allowed her one week off of work then pushed her back onto the strip.

"I was frightened but I did it," she says. "I had no choice. I wanted to stay with him and if I stayed with him, I would have to continue getting money."

The last night Mimi actually saw S., she was sitting in the passenger seat in his car in Vegas. They were arguing. He pulled over, kicked her out of the car, threw a few bills at her and left her on the side of the freeway. Even though she wanted to escape--that's why they were arguing--she says she cried for a half-hour straight. A few hours later, she hopped on a Greyhound bus. She spent the next two days watching the world slide by the window.

In the last five years, Mimi's spent a lot of time on buses shuttling from one city to another, one pimp after another. She's spent the majority of her time in buses, hotels and pimp's houses. Now more than anything she wants to get to Dawn's Place and learn how to be independent.

With luck (and funding), Sabella may be able to bring Mimi to Philadelphia and begin working on her year-long psychological, legal, emotional, physical and financial recovery. Mimi needs to get her many hospital bills sorted. She's already got a new passport, new Social Security card and a new birth certificate, which she proudly carries around with her. After Dawn's Place, she's dying to go to school. Years ago, she wanted to be a nurse and take care of sick people. Now she wants to become a lawyer. She says lawyers get to handle business, get to dress up and speak their minds; you get to win.

At one time, this pretty little girl was beaten to a bloody pulp by a trick who stole the shoes right off her feet. She ran back to her pimp bloody and barefoot. Now she's tired and needs a rest. But she's still running.

"I don't want to do this no more. I want to go back home. I want to be with my family. I'm tired of these tricks beating me up," she says. "Everything."

Andrew Reid wants the ball.

He glides down the side of the court, quickly coming to a stop near the baseline. He pivots toward the lane and waves his strong, calloused hands at his teammates.

"I'm wide open!" he bellows, scrunching his lips as he watches one of his teammates shoot the ball.

As the ball clanks off the rim, Reid spins, rolls down court, weaves in front of his frustrated opponent, and barks steadily.

"Turn, turn, turn!" he urges. "Defense!"

When one of his teammates on the Temple Rolling Owls wheelchair basketball team snags a loose ball, Reid, 15, flies back toward his basket, cuts to the corner and screams, "Kick it out!"

He catches a bounce pass, pokes his tongue out the right side of his mouth and drives toward the hoop. It doesn't matter to him that he's barely 4 feet tall and only 110 pounds. Reid dribbles into a crowd of older, beefier players from the Delaware Destroyers and launches a shot.

It doesn't drop but it doesn't really matter. His team is easily crushing their opponent.

And besides, Reid isn't even supposed to be here right now.

The team, which practices every Saturday at the Carousel House on Belmont Avenue, is open to teens with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, cancer or any other physical or developmental challenges.

Reid has osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bones disease. He breaks easily, especially during the winter months.

"I hurt my shoulder so I'm not supposed to be playing much," he grudgingly admits.

He's supposed to be saving himself for the big tournament. He practiced with the Komets earlier in the day, but when a team he moonlights with, the Rolling Owls, has a game, Reid can't resist.

"I'm really competitive," he says. "I hate to lose. I take wheelchair basketball very, very seriously."

Kirlin's 10-year old daughter, Katie, became paralyzed from the waist down when a tumor crushed her spinal cord in 1987. Between operations, Katie competed in wheelchair games across the country. She won medals at the junior National Wheelchair Games, and set a national record in swimming.

"Playing wheelchair games gave her hope," says Kirlin, 60. "Going to all these events and seeing all these other people in a similar situation, it made her feel like she could achieve anything."

The cost of competing--travel expenses, hotels and meals--was enormous. So a group of Kirlin's neighborhood friends, mostly longshoreman, organized a charity golf tournament. They raised $800.

Katie succumbed to cancer in 1989 but the golf tournament in her honor has continued annually. The 21st event in 2008 raised more than $60,000. Over the years, Kirlin estimates they've raised more than $1.3 million, and all of the money helps defray costs for young people participating in wheelchair sports.

The Komets are the pride of the Katie Kirlin Fund. The program has a national reputation, and over the last five years, nine Komets earned scholarships to play wheelchair basketball in college. Sarah Poiesz, a current Komet, is weighing offers from several universities.

"That man is a saint," Sarah's mother, Lynne Poiesz, says of Joe Kirlin. "I don't think he even recognizes the significance of what he's doing."

He's become a team leader, and he's more independent all around. Despite his fragile legs that can sustain his body weight only for brief periods, Reid learned to shuttle himself around the region using mass transit. He maneuvers city streets in his wheelchair while carrying his basketball wheelchair and gear.

Every day, he shoots 500 baskets and sprints numerous suicides. He lifts weights three times per week. He spends all of his free time on the court--playing, observing and absorbing everything.

"He probably knows more about the game than anyone on the team," says Jordan Prusack, coach of the Komets. "He's a born point guard, a general on the court."

Reid hopes to parlay his talents into a college scholarship. Then he wants to become a lawyer and sports agent.

His greatest fault is an insatiable love of the game.

Reid arrived at the court at 9 a.m., practiced with the Komets at noon, started the game with the Rolling Owls at 3, and he's still yapping now at 4.

"Come on!" he implores. "Let's shut them down!"

Prusack, who disapproves of Reid's extracurricular game, says, "They'll shove him out of here when they shut the lights off."

Philly artisans worry the federal government will put them out of business.

The handmade wooden cars that Frank Burkhauser sells in his Pine Street shop will not poison your children. He's sure of it.

"It's wood and some mineral oils," says Burkhauser, who owns Spirit of the Artist, a store selling a wide array of crafts. "I happen to know it's safe, whether it's tested or not. It's wood and finish. They can eat it if they want."

Burkhauser's toys probably won't appear on a kids' menu anytime soon. But he and numerous other Philadelphia artisans are worried that new federal testing rules designed to protect children will end up forcing them to give up making toys, bibs, sweaters and other handmade items for children--leaving the entertainment and clothing of American youth entirely in the hands of big corporations.

"There's panic in the market already," Burkhauser says.

That panic was created by the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), a federal law passed last year in the wake of safety scandals involving Chinese-made products. The act requires that all products created for children--including books, clothes and wooden toys--undergo testing and certification for toxic substances such as lead and phthalate.

What's more, the rules apply both to big businesses and the "mompreneurs" making bibs to sell on Etsy. Mattel can afford to pay $550 to test a toy; for Philly's community of knitters, woodworkers and other artisans--as well as the stores, like Burkhauser's, that sell their goods--that same cost could be a deal breaker.

"There's fear in the buyers because the buyers think they're gonna have to pull out in the future," Burkhauser says.

The crafters have already received one break. Facing an uproar over the requirements, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a "stay of enforcement," meaning the new rules--which were set to go into effect this month--won't be enforced until Feb. 10, 2010.

That leaves the craft community uncertain about what's next.

"There's been some attorneys general who say they intend to enforce the law," says Kathleen Fasanella, author of the book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing. "We don't know how stringent they're going to be."

But there is an opportunity to make the law work for everybody, she says, including consumers. She and many other industry insiders believe that the responsibility of testing for lead and phthalate should lie with the suppliers of raw materials.

"A lot of suppliers already certify their products, so we would like to be able to use our vendors' third-party certifications. And right now, we're not allowed to do that, which doesn't make sense," Fasanella says.

"If you make pajamas, you have to comply with flammability rules for kids, and we're allowed to use certifications from fabric vendors for flammability. So we're just saying it makes sense to do that with lead and phthalate testing as well."

Even with the stay of enforcement, nervous chatter about CPSIA was prominent at the recent biannual Buyers Market of American Craft, hosted at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Wendy Rosen, president of the Buyers Market, is protective of her community.

"These people are the most organic people on the face of the earth," she says. "We all know that the toys that have been of the greatest concern have been imported toys."

Rosen says the fear created by CPSIA has already damaged the industry.

"In a time of so much fear right now for small businesses, this is just too much," she says. "What is the impact of fear and what is the impact of legislation? Those are two separate things."

Fasanella, though, was hopeful.

"The point is that consumers need to be protected," she says. "It's not a situation of either/or, where only consumers or only manufacturers need to be protected. We can make this situation work for everybody."

Watch Jeff Fusco's slideshow from the funeral.

It was a fearfully cold day, and thousands of police officers marched past the memorial squad car for yet another fallen officer. They shared the same small steps, the same grave looks, the same stiff backs. They marched into the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul past a sea of fellow well-wishers who stood outside, cheeks red and cold in the wind. They marched inside until the Basilica was nearly filled with people; those left outside stood solemnly during the Catholic funeral of Officer John Pawlowski.

After the service, the officers marched out, same as before, then police cars zoomed off in an endless line. The hearse carrying Officer Pawlowski was followed by a phalanx of motorcycles and sparkling white cars from the Police Department. The motorcade went up I-95, toward the neighborhoods where the grid system breaks down, where so many of the police officers live in stout postwar houses near the Delaware. (Pawlowski still lived where he grew up, in Parkwood Manor, a stone's throw from the suburbs.)

The procession swept past officers and firefighters on overpasses, past officers paying their respects in solemn roadside salutes. It went into the suburbs and by the schools and strip malls on Street Road. It went through fire-truck arches and past bikers holding American flags in the brisk February winds. Finally, it went through the gates of Resurrection Cemetery.

Yet the number of police officers who memorialize their fallen brother or sister seems to grow each time. The services, the procession, the officers at the cemetery--it all seems like more this time. Even actor David Morse, the guy who played a former Philadelphia cop in the TV show Hack, stands against a light pole outside the church. With each loss, the department grows stronger.

Enormous groups of police personnel gathered in John Pawlowski's memory last week. They lined the pews at St. Anselm's in Parkwood on Monday night. They marched down Academy Road on Thursday at dusk to the funeral home for the wake. They processed in and out of the Basilica and stood still at the cemetery as the cold wind swept across the hillsides lined with headstones. The fierce, consistent presence is an impressive show of unity. It shuts down streets; it silences cities.

They are feared and comforting, loathed and respected. They are always late and always on time. They inspire strong emotions.

So it's fitting the police funeral has become such a spectacle. Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey came here from Chicago, where police funerals almost stop time. He felt Philly needed more pomp and circumstance. He wanted to march with the mayor to the funeral home for the wake; he wanted police recruits to dot the road to the gravesite; he wanted the horse-drawn carriages and the symbolic reminders that one good man is missing.

At the cemetery, helicopters flew overhead in a missing-man formation. Police officers from the 35th District signed off Officer John Pawlowski for the last time: "From members of the 35th District and your entire police family, we thank you for a job well done."

The words of the service, the procession of cars, the final words at the cemetery are ritual and tradition, done the same way many times over the last few months.

But they are done with a precision that shows great care. The pallbearers practiced in the days leading up to Pawlowski's funeral by carrying a casket stuffed with dumbbells. When the time came, they marched despite the cold weather. The spectacle of it all is maybe the most uplifting thing the police department does. They just do it right.