By Jacob Weissert
Slavery is gone, right? Slavery has been officially abolished in every country in the world for over a hundred years, so that means its gone, right? You’d think that’d be true, but in reality there is still slavery in the world, though it goes by a different name—human trafficking.
People have been sold into slavery and forced to do all kinds of work for thousands of years. The first recorded use of slavey was in a Sumerian law code in 2000 BC. So the enslavement and exploitation of people is nothing new. But now, instead of slavery of people mainly for work, there is trafficking, which is the illegal trade of people.
There are four main subcategories of human trafficking: trafficking women for sexual explAoitation, trafficking for forced labor, commercial sexual exploitation of children in tourism, and trafficking in organs.
Trafficking women for sexual exploitation is when a woman is abducted or lured into a job that doesn’t exist, and then forced into prostitution. Trafficking for forced labor is when someone is abducted and forced to do hard labor. Commercial sexual exploitation of children is when children are sold off as sex slaves to dirty men. Organ trafficking is a rapidly growing form of crime in which someone is abducted and their organs, usually one of their kidneys, are taken and sold on a black market for huge profits. They are sold to people who are on the incredibly long waiting list for organs.
The fact that these events are going on in the world today is sickening. What’s even more sickening is that people don’t know about this.
The level of awareness of human trafficking is not what it should be. This isn’t a small scale crime. This is a huge crime. Every year 2.4 million people are trafficked. You may say, “Well that only happens in poor countries.” That’s wrong. Over 17,500 people are trafficked across United States borders every year. This isn’t a crime where only a few people or countries are affected. Trafficking happens in every country in the world.
The key to stopping or preventing trafficking is to raise awareness for it. There are many organizations, like the Polaris Project, which try to raise awareness for human trafficking. They do this by holding charity events, doing presentations at schools, and even through the internet. Informing the public on human trafficking is a huge step towards preventing it.
In addition to informing the public about human trafficking, there are also many organizations that work against trafficking in the field. These organizations usually run on donations from the general populous. They combat human trafficking by creating “safe houses” for people who have been trafficked. These safe houses allow those who have been trafficked to assimilate back into society.
The only problem with these “safe house” organizations is that they run on donations from the general public. So the more people that are aware of the problem, and the more people that are willing to do something about the problem, the more safe houses can be built to help rescue people.
Like I said before, 17,500 people are trafficked in the United States every year. This terrible injustice is happening on our doorstep but we aren’t doing anything! What if you were one of those 17,500 people? Would you want people to help then? The public needs to be informed on the subject of human trafficking and how to prevent it. We also need to give more money to help prevent trafficking. All the traffickers care about is money, and since human trafficking is a 38 billion dollar industry, it’s not going to stop until people band together and do something about it.
Everyone needs to look at the topic as if they, themselves are affected, step up, and do something about it.
