The month of January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and today, January 11, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. I wanted to write a quick blog post with some basic facts on trafficking for today, and then explore each point more in depth over the rest of the month.
What is Human Trafficking? Human Trafficking is the trade in humans, modern slavery. The purposes are most commonly for sexual slavery and exploitation, forced labor, or extraction of organs and tissues. The people oppressed by the slave trade are completely controlled by another person. The control is maintained by using violence or threatening violence, the enslaved person is exploited and is unable to walk away from the situation.
Where does this happen? Slavery is not legal anywhere, but it happens everywhere. It is most rampant in India and Africa. This is not a problem restricted to third world countries. It DOES happens here in the United States. The US Justice Department estimates that 17,500 people are trafficking into the United States every year. That number could be much higher due to the large number of undocumented immigrants. As well as people being trafficking into the country, the issue of Americans being exploited in the domestic sex trade is massive. According to Shared Hope International (sharedhope.org) at least 100,000 American children alone are being exploited through pornography or prostitution every year.
How big of a problem is this? There are more people currently in slavery in the world than there were throughout the entire run of the Transatlantic slave trade. Estimages range from 27-29 million people worldwide living in slavery. There are an estimated 2 million children currently being exploited in the global sex trade.
The trafficking industry generates $32 billion a year. It is all about money. Wherever the demand exists there are people who take advantage and gain the supply to fill that demand and feed their own greed. Consider this shocking quote from Tony Talbott...
“It’s all about the money. Human trafficking is insanely profitable. If you really think about it, you can sell a kilo of Heroin once; you can sell a 13-year-old girl 20 times a night, 365 days a year.” And you should feel a little outraged about this. You should feel upset about this. And that’s great – but it’s not good enough.” ~ Tony Talbott
Awareness is just the first step. Awareness by itself does not solve the problem, but it is essential to propel people to action.
So what can YOU do about it?
1. Make yourself aware of the facts about human slavery including how to recognize it. This link to the Polaris Projects page on recognizing the signs of trafficking is a great start.
http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/recognizing-the-signs
2. Spread that knowledge, among your family, your friends, you community. Use social networking tools like Twitter or Facebook for spreading awareness.
3. Use the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) tip line to report your suspicions if you see signs of human trafficking 1-888-373-7888. You can also fill out this online form http://www.polarisproject.org/what-we-do/national-human-trafficking-hotline/report-a-tip
4. Join up with other people in your area interested in putting an end to this injustice. You can sign up with IJM Freedom Commons to find other people in your area and ideas of what you can do to join in the fight. http://freedomcommons.ijm.org/
5. Partner with existing organizations that are working to end modern slavery. Here are just three you can look into:
International Justice Mission http://www.ijm.org/
Polaris Project http://www.polarisproject.org/
Shared Hope International http://sharedhope.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment