What to know about human trafficking

• Human trafficking is slavery
• It involves one person controlling another and exploiting for the purposes of work. Victims are trapped physically, psychologically, financially, or emotionally by their traffickers.

• It happens where you live
• Stories about human trafficking are often set in far away places, like Calcutta, Cambodia, Brazil, but it also happens here
• Enslaved farm workers have been found harvesting tomatoes in Florida and picking strawberries in California
• Young girls have been forced into prostitution across the U.S., in cities such as Toledo, Columbus, Atlanta, Wichita, and Los Angeles
• Wherever you live, chances are some form of human trafficking has taken place there.

• It happens to people like you
• Most human trafficking victims are females under 18, but men and older adults can be trafficking victims too.
• Children from middle-class families, women with college degrees, and people from dominant religious or ethnics groups can be victims
• Wherever there is a demand, the product must be supplied

• Products you eat, wear, and use everyday may have been made by human trafficking victims
• Human trafficking isn't just in your town, its in your home. According to productsofslavery.org, human trafficking victims are forced to make many of the products we use everyday.
• Trafficking in the production of consumer goods is so widespread, most people in the U.S. have worn, touched, or consumed a product of human trafficking at some point.

• We can end human trafficking
• We can not only end trafficking around the world, we can end it within our generation
• To achieve this goal we need to work together, activists around the world are launching and winning campaigns to hold governments and companies accountable, and create better laws to deter trafficking.

Image: www.theironjen.com
Works Cited:
Kloer, Amanda. 5 Things to know about human trafficking, www.cnn.com

We can stop human trafficking

With organization such as UNICEF, UNICEFUSA, The International Labour Organization, United Nations, and The United States Department of State working together we can stop human trafficking. Already activist are launching campaigns to hold governments and companies accountable for human trafficking. The previously mentioned organizations are working with governments around the world to develop laws to bring offenders of human trafficking to justice. The U.S. Department of States Trafficking in Persons Report 2014 shows that there were approximately 9,460 trafficking-related prosecutions and 5,775 trafficking-related convictions during 2013. Of those, 1,199 prosecutions and 470 convictions involved labor trafficking.

The key aspects in the prevention of human trafficking are Prevention, Protection, and Prosecution.

Prevention should consist of working with communities to change norms and practices that exacerbate children's vulnerabilities to trafficking. Helping to provide a living wage for parents so that their children do not have to work is one of the ways to decrease the risk of trafficking. Supporting the training of professional working with children, including social workers, health care workers and police and border officials to help stop trafficking.

Protection begins with proper victim identification, then legal processes must be put in place for removing children from trafficking situations. Victims need to be placed in a safe environment, providing them with social services, health care, psychosocial support, and reintegration with family and community. The most important point is to avoid double victimization, to ensure that this children or any other victims are not treated as criminals.

Prosecution starts with lobbying governments and other partners to develop laws and strengthen child protection systems to prevent and respond to violence and abuse. Providing education to law enforcement services will increase awareness of trafficking. The key in the prevention of human trafficking is legislative reform, and establishing minimum labor standards.
 

Image: www.healingdeliverance.net

Child Trafficking not just someone else's problem

 

Child Trafficking not just someone else's problem

 

Child victims of trafficking are recruited, transported, transferred, harbored or received for the purpose of exploitation. They may be forced to work in sweatshops, on construction sites or in houses as domestic servants; on the streets as child beggars, in wars as child soldiers. Some are forced to work in brothels and strip clubs or for escort and massage services. The trafficking in children is closely related to the demand for cheap labor, where the working conditions and the treatment grossly violates the human rights of children.

 

According to UNICEFUSA the United States is a source and transit country, and is also considered one of the top destination points for victims of child trafficking and exploitation. Child trafficking is about taking children out of their protective environment and preying on their vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation. According to the International Labour Organization in 2005 there was an estimated 1.2 million children, both boys and girls, in a forced labor situation as a result of trafficking.

 

 

More Statistics

 

The following statistics where obtained by the International Labour Organization in 2012

 

• There is an estimated 20.9 million victims globally forced into labor and trafficking.
• 4.5 million are victims of sexual slavery/sex trafficking globally.
• 98% of victims of sexual slavery/sex trafficking worldwide are women and girls.
• Sexual exploitation makes up 79% of identified forms on international cross border human trafficking.
• Approximately 600,000 to 800,000 human trafficking victims are trafficked across international borders worldwide every year.
• Most sex trafficking is regional or national and is perpetrated by traffickers who are the same nationality as their victims.
• As many as 2 million children are subjected to prostitution in the global commercial sex trade.
• Estimates suggest as many as 300,000 children annually are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.
• The average age of entry into prostitution in the United States is 13-14 years old.
• Nationwide there are fewer than thirty safe homes for victims of sex trafficking to receive treatment and services. This severe shortage regularly causes their inappropriate placement in juvenile detention facilities. 

Image: www.covenanthousedc.org



What is Human Trafficking?

 What is Human Trafficking?

 

 

The United Nations office on Drugs and Crime defines Human Trafficking in their Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, as the trafficking in persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation, Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

 

 

Three Elements of Human Trafficking



 

1. The Act: Recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons.
2. The Means: Threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person in control of the victim.
3. The Purpose: Exploitation, which includes exploiting the prostitution of others, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery or similar practices and the removal of organs.

 

 

Image: www.presstv.ir

 

 



Sold by Patricia McCormick

 

 

Sold is a story about Lakshmi, a thirteen year old girl living in Nepal. Although her life is hard, living in poverty on the side of the Himalayan mountain, she for the most part is happy. She goes to school, has a goat for a pet, tends her garden and rice paddy, and dreams of the day that she will marry the boy she was promised to. She loves her mother Ama, adores her baby brother, and is indifferent to her step father who likes to gamble away what little money they have.

 

After a monsoon washes away their rice paddy, the families only source of income, survival becomes increasingly difficult. Lakshmi's stepfather sells her to a stranger from India for 800 rupees. Lakshmi is deceived and told that she will be working as a maid, she happily goes with the stranger because she wants to be able to help her family, in particular her mother and brother. As she travels to her new home, Lakshmi sees a world she never new existed when she was living on her beautiful mountain side in Nepal. Lakshmi has no idea of the horrible future that awaits her at her final destination, Happiness House.

 

Happiness House is anything but happy, it is more a prison for young girls, who are forced to sell themselves to any man that enters. At first Lakshmi refuses her fate, but she endures daily beatings and starvation. When that doesn't break her will, she is drugged, being unable to fight back she is continually raped. Lakshmi  loses her will to fight and finally gives in. "Men come. They crush my bones with their weight. They split me open. Then they disappear. I hurt. I am torn and bleeding where the men have been."

 

I have to admit, when I read the previous passage I was moved to tears. Because it was written in a first-person narrative it made reading it very difficult. You felt Lakshmi's pain and anguish, you take the journey with her and see what she sees.

 

The story of Lakshmi is more than just words on a page, this story forces us to think of things so inconceivable, things that we could never imagine in our worst nightmares. It is my hope that it will also force us to act, to take action and do what needs to be done to stop human trafficking and ultimately end it. Human trafficking (which includes both sex and labor) is slavery. It is estimated that over a million people are trafficked into slavery each year. Although the character of Lakshmi is ficticous, unfortunately her story is not. The purpose of this blog is not only to discuss a book, but to also bring awareness to the issue of human trafficking, to identify it, to discuss what is being done to stop it, and how we as individuals may be able to help.