Let’s talk about the third international crime industry behind drugs and guns. Human trafficking is the use of coercion, fraud, or force to compel another person to labor. Trafficking happens when need meets greed, but to go deeper it happens when workers are excluded from protections and denied rights. Human Trafficking better known as slavery is basically the new slavery or when it comes to sex, the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children. We also like to give it acronyms to make it not sound so bad. What is the true value of a human life? Unfortunately, Numbers don’t lie;
30 billion dollars are generated yearly from human trafficking
45 million USD spent a year on online sex trafficking in the US
35 million enslaved globally
300,000 children at risk for human trafficking a year
200,000 dollars Per year is what a pimp makes for 1 victim
13 The average age of a child prostitute
100 USD is the average cost of a U.S. slave
1 million slaves are moved across international borders on the black market 70 percent being women and 50 percent being children
60,000 is estimated to be the yearly amount of victims that die from abuse, disease, torture, and neglect.
11,000 USD is the average price to buy a child as a suicide bomber
This is a worldwide epidemic covered by news of many different countries:
Ex: Sex Trafficking in Bosnia
Sex Tourism in Thailand.
Human Trafficking in a New Jersey hair salon
Suicide Bombers in the middle east
Human trafficking isn’t just found in the sex industry. It’s found in fields, mines, the food industry, the clothing industry, and the technological industry. Humans are sold as slaves for many reasons:
- Labor – (Main Reason)
- Forced Sex – (Main Reason)
- Organs
- Babies
- War soldiers (for armed conflicts)
- Suicide Bombers (Yes you can buy a child to sit in as your suicide bomber)
Ninety percent of women involved in prostitution were victims of child sex abuse or raped by the age of 18. Children that are getting prostituted and enslaved are usually by their own family members. They start getting swapped out for money, rent drugs, favors. A lot of these children are Caucasian girls in the United States. The internet has greatly increased human trafficking. They can use the Internet to filter out girls by so many categories. It’s like yelp for human trafficking. What does a sex buyer look like? I know your thinking of shady men driving through the street at night looking for prostitutes but, envision men in suits, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and your neighbors.
I’ll leave off with this bit of knowledge; there are more slaves today in 2018 than ever in history. How is that for evolution? How did this happen? This is a huge problem that is quite easy to ignore. What can we do? It’s up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support.