The movie "Trade," which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, was inspired by "The Girls Next Door," Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story on sex trafficking in the United States. It's not the first article to examine this issue, but it is certainly one of the first to bring it into the forefront of American consciousness.

The movie, though fictional, picks up where Landesman's story left off -- striving to promote awareness of a problem that's closer to home than most people think.

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"Trade," directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner, follows the efforts of 17-year-old Jorge (Cesar Ramos) to save his 13-year-old sister Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) after she's kidnapped by an underground network of international sex traffickers in Mexico City. On his journey, Jorge finds an ally in a Texas cop named Ray (Kevin Kline), while his sister befriends Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a young Polish woman in the same trafficking ring who helps her find the courage to survive the ordeal.

"Trade" offers an up-close, disturbing look at the crime of sex trafficking, mirroring the approach Landesman took when he reported on the issue. It breaks down the trafficking system into its constituent parts to further illustrate its brutality.

It is an intricate movie that occasionally strays into being over the top. However, the characters are largely believable and the film carefully avoids any graphic sexual imagery that might appeal to traffickers and their customers.

In researching "The Girls Next Door," Landesman was interested in talking to those involved in sex-trafficking rings -- from the victims to the traffickers -- rather than getting most of his information from law enforcement officials or academics.

"These are very tough people to get to and tough people to get to open up to you," he said. "That was the great challenge, which is why it took me about six, seven months to even really find people who would open up."

Landesman started by finding sex-trafficking survivors in Moldova, the Ukraine, Mexico and the United States. He then backtracked to women still involved in trafficking rings and finally to the networks themselves. His methods involved posing as a customer, meeting with girls involved -- in situations that were safe for them -- and getting close to people who trafficked for profit.

"It was exhausting, it was deploring, it was deplorable, it was emotionally draining. But it was worth it. I was shocked by what I saw." Landesman said. "I was surprised by really how large a subculture this is in the United States. It's really enormous."

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Many consider "The Girls Next Door" a groundbreaking piece. It has earned its share of accolades, including an Overseas Press Club citation in 2004 for best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights. But some critics have questioned the legitimacy of Landesman's sources and the scope of the problem he chronicles.

One such critic, Slate Magazine's Jack Shafer believes that sex trafficking in the U.S. exists. But in the three years after Landesman's magazine piece was published, Shafer says, "no one has found sex trafficking in the size and dimension that he describes it."

Landesman dismisses the criticisms. He says people like Shafer are missing the point: "The story is about human experience, about cruelty, about exploitation, and not about math." He stands by all the facts in the article, he says -- with the exception of minor corrections that "will happen in any 9,000-word investigative story."

Ronald Weitzer, a professor of sociology at George Washington University who's an expert on sex trafficking, said reliable statistics on sex trafficking are hard to come by -- especially on the international level -- because of the nature of the crime and varying definitions of sex trafficking used by government agencies and nongovernmental organizations.

Weitzer is among those who question the scope of the problem as reported in "The Girls Next Door." But, he added, "No one is arguing that sex trafficking is a myth."

"Severe sex trafficking does exist," he said. "It is quite clear that it does."

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Rosa Sobrino works for asap in New York.

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