Maybe all this haggling is irrelevant, until we find out how the authors of this article came up with their estimate. They may be right, may be wrong, but they haven;t given us the means to evaluate the numbers.
I’m a biker who travels all summer, stopping at truck stops all over the US. Most of them aren’t big enough to support even one hooker.
Most of the others are not hooker friendly. The ones I have seen that do have hookers, do not have under age hookers. The ladies are somewhat less than lovely.
While truck stop hookers are not uncommon, I’ve never seen one who looked to be remotely close to underage, much less a slave.