When missionaries to Mexico, Jason and Nicole Fitzpatrick, first met 13-year-old Maria a few months ago, they learned that she had been living on the streets of Mexico City for three weeks. She had run away from home, because her drug-addicted mother was renting her to other drug addicts for sex for the equivalent of $4 per day. With that money, Maria's mother financed her own drug habit.

Worthless. Unwanted. And Cursed. Those are a few of the labels that, branded deeply into "Sinak's" heart, continually tormented her.

Her mother is a prostitute. And nine-year old Sandra is a casuality of her nation's sex tourism industry. She is immediately recognized in Thailand as a luk-kreung, that is, a "half-child" born of a poor Thai mother and an absent Western father.

Provocative young girls beckoned every sidewalk passerby: "Don't resist! Come inside!" Pulsing street music and flashing lights mixed to form a hellish vortex that pulled the unwary towards their seductive summons. I was in a red-light district in Thailand. It felt as if we were in Satan's backyard.