Williams, 38, was sentenced to 246 months in prison last week, and courthouse sources say he continued to blame the teenage girl for his predicament.

Actually, it was state lawmakers, who passed a law against aggravated human trafficking, that gave prosecutors the power to charge adults who recruit or transport girls for illegal sexual activities. Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc Bennett, who directs the sex crimes trial unit, said before the law went into effect in 2007, there wasn’t a charge that would bring substantial prison time.

Williams was the first person in Sedgwick County charged under the 2007 law. A jury convicted him in September.

Judge Clark Owens based Williams’ hefty sentence last week on a criminal history that dated to the 1980s.

The girl testified that she was a runaway who ended up being taken in by a women whose name she didn’t know. There, the girl said she made $6,000 in about two weeks of performing sexual favors for customers along a stretch of Northwest Highway near I-35 in Dallas. She said she gave the money to Williams.

Williams remains in the Sedgwick County Jail, awaiting prison placement by the Kansas Department of Corrections.

But it’s a much bigger problem than the story told this week by the 15-year-old Wichita girl in the human trafficking trial of Marlin Williams.

Two years ago, ABC News reported a study estimating some 650,000 teenagers in the U.S. had sold sex for drugs or money. In Dallas, where the Wichita girl testified that Williams took her to work the streets, police found girls as young as 12 working in strip clubs this year.

The girl told the Sedgwick County jury this week Williams promised her he would take her off the streets as soon as he raised enough money to open his own club.

There also seems to be a part of popular culture, including the music of Lil’ Wayne, which the girl said she listened to and quoted on her MySpace page, that appears to promote treating women as sex objects.

Police intervened and sent the girl back to Dallas, where she is now in a state program for independent living and reunited with the daughter she had at age 14, then abandoned.

Still, thousands of others remain on the streets.