Human trafficking is a hard subject. At its core, it’s slavery. It takes advantage of vulnerable individuals (children, immigrants, women, and men) and uses coercion and manipulation to force people into providing services they ordinarily never would.

While all instances of trafficking are violations of human rights (as defined by the United Nations), there’s something insidious about the abuse and manipulation that happens to our children. 

I want to preface this discussion by saying that all instances of trafficking make my skin crawl. I think we leave this topic in the shadows because of how profoundly uncomfortable it makes us. And I get it, even having lived through some of the most heinous examples of how bad this gets, I still have trouble talking about it. It’s scary. None of us willingly want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who has been trafficked. I’ve spent most of my young life desperately running from the memories and trauma. While I was trafficked as a child, not all trafficking involves children. And though mine did, not all trafficking involves sex. The most prevalent form of trafficking in adult males is labor. It’s not uncommon for immigrants to be forced to work under threat of deportation or outright having their documents held as collateral.

To circle back to kids, they don’t have a choice. They are entirely reliant on another adult to meet their needs. A newborn cannot feed itself, escape danger, fight back against an attacker, communicate their feelings, or consent to anything. Not much changes in the early formative years.

I think most of us wish to think that human trafficking is an issue that happens somewhere else. Not in my community, not in my country, not my problem. Unfortunately, as I and many others attest to, it happens right around the corner. Sometimes it’s hard to spot. Sometimes a young girl’s body is sold by her parents. Sometimes it’s a young boy. Religion has unfortunately been used as a front. We then get into the issue of sexual assault and abuse of minors. When does abuse become trafficking? 

Oftentimes, I fear a lot of people just don’t want to ask questions. I’m not saying that for myself or anyone else that one person snooping around would have altered the outcome. Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn’t have. The world traffickers inhabit is a dark one. A lot of people disappeared from my life when I was growing up, never for me to see them again. It’s colored dark from the edges all the way through. And while not all of those who engage in criminal activity do so intelligently, some are bloody brilliant and are incredibly hard to figure out— even more so when most of us want to remain ignorant or are too busy just trying to stay afloat in our own lives.

In the U.S. a little over 10,000 individuals called the national trafficking hotline that Polaris operates (we donate to this organization). One thing researchers tend to agree on is that relying on methods of self-reporting typically results in fewer individuals than what is actually happening. I draw back on my research and methods statistics courses in graduate school to corroborate this information. In other words, the real picture may be worse than any report is likely to reveal.

I say this with a grain of salt, however. At the end of the day, we only have the numbers we have. There's no irrefutable law that makes the previous statement true. It could be exactly as the picture looks. It could be over inflated. As much as it pains me, my experiences and emotions are eased to the side when it comes to statistical data. I’m a case example, not an inherent truth. Our data is an estimate, never the whole picture of reality. Make of that what you will.

Polaris did an analysis of the hotline callers and identified roughly 73% of these cases as involving sex trafficking, with escort services and pornography being the top two methods of trafficking. And while unsurprising to me, family members/ caregivers are the number one recruiter. One's intimate partner, followed by employer are second and third respectively

The picture looks something like this:

Vulnerabilities such as being a child, immigrant, or recently moving put a person at risk. One’s family member/ caregiver, intimate partner, or employer are likely to be the ones doing the recruiting. At the other end of that road, employers are more likely to exploit (traffic) an individual, followed by someone with a familial relationship to the victim.

I recommend learning to see the world in a more informed way. It’s what I’m personally trying to do— in my case it’s about stepping out of the world of trafficking, not into it.

Having an appropriately critical eye on parents/ caregivers is needed. Just as having critical eyes on employers and intimate partners is needed. I believe it's possible to live your life fully and still keep an eye out for others.

I'll detail some of the things to look for in a future post.