Two Day Magazine

By “breaking them in”, I mean that they rape these young men and women until they no longer fight back. Many human traffickers also try to expose their victims to drugs, get them hooked, and in exchange for prostituting themselves, the traffickers supply them with their fixes in order to keep them docile and incapacitated.  Human traffickers are also masters at covering their tracks, keeping their victims anonymous, and transporting their victims from one country to the next, unnoticed.  A large number of the victims that police finally find and are able to question are too afraid to testify because the traffickers have set numerous threats upon their friends and family.  These people are not your everyday criminals; they have elaborate systems, transportation, and a lot of money.

On an international scale, eighty percent of human trafficking victims are women and girls, and about fifty percent of all victims are under the age of eighteen.  Some of these victims are sold into human trafficking by their desperate parents.  Most of these victims will be used for sexual exploitation.  Human trafficking is one of the biggest illegal industries in the world today, and it is terrorizing and abusing the lives of many people across the globe.  A lot of people would like to say that it doesn’t affect us, but there is no denying that these victims are trafficked in and out of our borders. There are reports from the State Department of the United States that approximately eight hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand people are trafficked internationally every year, and about a hundred thousand more individuals are trafficked within their own countries.

Close to a million people are year are trafficked in our world.  These numbers can hardly be counted as accurate due to the fact that a great number of trafficking victims are unknown to statistics because this issue is also unknown to many people.  Traffickers exist everywhere, not just in “bad” areas of the world or dark alley ways, but in our small towns and neighborhoods.  We can no longer afford to be blind towards this issue. 

Slavery of human beings, no matter what race, religion, or heritage they belong to, is detestable and shocking and should not be tolerated.

If you wish to learn more, and be a part of this fight against the enslavement of children and adults, go to http://www.endhumantrafficking.org, and join The Project to End Human Trafficking, or PEHT.  Also, send your local representative an email or letter and demand action with Human Trafficking.

 (1) 
"The Project to End Human Trafficking." End Human Trafficking. 23 Nov. 2008     
<http://www.endhumantrafficking.org/ >.
(2) 
"Human Trafficking: An international Study." Unt.Edu/Honors/Eaglefeather/2005_Issue/JohnKutty2. 2005. 23 Nov. 2008
<http://www.unt.edu/honors/eaglefeather/2005_Issue/Johnykutty2.shtml>.
(3)
Kennedy, Kim. "Against Their Will." The Realities of Human Trafficking. 12 Sept. 2007. CBS. 23 Nov. 2008
<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/11/earlyshow/main3250963.shtml>.