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What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—community and culture are key. He quotes, for example, the historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages: “The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”

Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an abundance of leisure time. So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming explains, “In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure time – say, a three-day working week, or less – is hard to sustain, because any individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one more cheaply). These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely. This is what puts the grim into reality.”

A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.

Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.

Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.