CRIME: Human Trafficking

August 04, 2017

CRIME: Human Trafficking

What is human trafficking?

Source: UNODC

Purpose? From work slaves to sex slaves.
Horrible things are done to people who are sold.
Most people think it is just women and children
being trafficked but it is men as well. The number
of men have been slowly increasing over the last
10 years.

Who is doing this? Everyone. There isn't one type of person selling people, one race, one culture, one gender. Sellers comes from all over the world just like the slaves come from every corner of the earth.

Human trafficking occurs in three forms, trading within the same country, same region but outside the country, or outside the country/region entirely. People are not just being kidnapped on the streets but being lured in by job offers, marriage proposals, sold by their families, or having run away. In many cases to keep people from trying to escape their passports and IDs are being stolen, threaten with being reported for entry a country illegally, or having their lives threaten if they try to leave or simply having no where else to go.

It is a sad realization. Slavery hasn't ended. It is still present today in almost, if not all countries.

2016 State Department Report

By 2012, the International Labor Organization estimated there were 20.9 million people who victims of human trafficking. The UN reported 2.4 million people were trafficked just in that year. In the same year over 3,000 cases were reported in the United States.

The profit? It is estimated to be between $32,000,000,000 to 150,000,000,000 a year.

It is averaged that 600,000 to 800,000 people are sold internationally every year, 80% being female and half of that are children, according to the U.S. State Department.

In 2014 it was reported that Asia had the highest number of labor slaves in the world at 11.7 million or 56%. Some of the top countries for human trafficking in 2014 were Russia, China, and Uzbekistan.

The Atlantic: State Department 2013

To makes things worse, the numbers are only rising.

In 2008 Bradley Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project said, “It’s the third-largest and fastest-growing crime worldwide (because it combines) high profit and low risk."

In 2016 in the U.S. only there were over 7,000 reports of human trafficking, a stagger increase from 2012, which was over 4,000 meaning the numbers have almost doubled in only four years.