Dateline: April 18

This week’s episode Dateline follows a mother, private detective and armed bounty hunters trying to rescue teenagers from a sex trafficking underworld in Texas.

Robyn Cory drives down a busy Houston street looking for her daughter Kristen.

She is accompanied by private investigator Betty Simons and a team of armed bounty hunters.

Kristen Galvan, 19, has been missing for three years. This is the second time she has disappeared.

At age 15, Kristen was being actively groomed by a sex trafficker. She ran away with the man she thought to be her boyfriend.

A week-and-a-half later, Houston police found Kristen on Bissonnet Street, a thoroughfare in Houston notorious for street prostitution and gun crime

“The detectives were talking with us and clearly she had been sex trafficked,” Robyn said.

“I needed to get her away from Houston.”

Robyn arranged for Kristen to stay at her grandmother’s house without a phone. But after observing progress in Kristen’s behaviour following psychiatry, family and trauma counselling, her phone was returned.

Kristen was gone again within the next two days. A cycle of exploitation has kept her tied to her trafficker.

Tuesday 18 April, 9.30pm on SBS.