Human Trafficking Essay

Submitted By Jonathan-Guevara
Words: 798
Pages: 4

Jonathan Guevara
9/12/14
Professor
CJ
Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is the illegal movement of people, where humans are being treated as possessions to be forced into prostitution or involuntary labor. The people being exploited are trapped in a horrible world. They're usually often beat, starved, or forced to work as prostitutes. According to the International Labour Organization, there are estimates that there is 20.9 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. 5.5 million of those are children. 14.2 million of those are victims of labor exploitation. Also, in 2005 it was reported by the International Labour Organization that forced labor generates $32 billion in profits worldwide. Human trafficking provides a ready source of income for organized crime groups, this is why it’s important to put a stop to it. Human trafficking strongly occurs in other countries is cause of the lack of political and economic stability in the country. This for a fact makes it easier for human traffickers to array on the trade in these countries. As for the problem in the United States, The National Center of Missing and Exploited Children estimates that there are 100,000 youths under the age of 18 in the commercial sex trade in the U.S. In 2012, 1 out of 8 endangered runaways reported to the National Center and Missing & Exploited Children were likely child sex trafficking victims. This crime happens everyday of the year so it demands attention. Everyone could in fact discover and run in to a potential human trafficking situation. Many can be hidden and locked behind doors. Many victims of trafficking can be harmed and severely punished if they talk to police or anybody because of the suspicion that they tell of what is being done to them. There are many red flag indicators that can point out a potential trafficking situation. Unpaid or very little pay, poor living conditions, inability to speak to individual alone, signs of physical abuse, submissive or fearful, and the individual being under 18 in prostitution. In the documentary Selling The Girl Next Door, we saw that Amber Lyon investigates teen trafficking in America. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that hundreds of thousands of girls under the age of 18 are brought into the world of prostitution each year. As we saw in the documentary, many of the teenage girls are runaways who are just trapped in a dark world by their pimps. In the documentary, Lyon goes to a well known bunny ranch in Las Vegas and asks several questions to the women workers. Come to find out that many of them had started young and didn’t know what to do, so they resorted to legal prostitution. As we saw in the documentary the way the pimps advertise these young underage girls are through websites such as Craigslist and Backpage, these two are popular websites that contain an adult section for the pimps to post these ads. Amber Lyon also shows us and makes us understand how easy it quick and easy it can be by going undercover posing as a teenager