For bored shoppers seeking titillation in the supermarket checkout line, the October i0 issue of the National Enquirer did not disappoint. Sandwiched between write-ups on Mexican wolf boys and Oprah’s suicidal niece, one story stood out as the week’s most lurid. hockingly, at least 600,000 children are being bought and sold on our nation’s streets today for the perverted sexual pleasure of adults,” began a story on page 19. “Incredibly, some of them are only toddlers, 3, 4, and 5. It is one of America’s greatest shames!”

Toddler sex slaves? For sale on city streets? It was enough to make even jaded Enquirer readers put down their groceries and pay attention. And it got worse. In prose as purple as any churned out at the tabloid’s Lantana, Florida, headquarters, the author went on to describe “boys and girls standing in doorways, waiting for lecherous lowlifes to express interest”; pimps “buying and selling children like so much meat in a butcher shop”; and kids willing to “have sex for whatever it takes to survive another day — a hot pizza, a place to sleep, a coat to wear.”