Social Effects Of Sex Trafficking

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When most people think of the term human trafficking they think of young females being taken from their families and sold into sexual exploitation. However, males often fall victim to human trafficking and sexual exploitation as well. Based off of media coverage and targeted legislation it would appear that the commercial sexual exploitation of men and boys is a relatively new concept. In reality, males have been and are being subjected to commercial sexual exploitation in many countries around the world. In some cases they even outnumber female victims within certain subcategories of trafficking (Greve, 2014). This realization may come as a shock to some, nevertheless, in order to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation we must first …show more content…
However, we here in America are now being forced to pay attention to sex trafficking like never before. Awareness of the issue regarding sexual trafficking has slowly grown in recent years, due largely to the passing of several federals laws beginning with the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. Even with the rise in awareness the male population of victims remain predominantly unseen. Several studies have been conducted showing that males represent upwards of fifty percent of those who fall victim to sexual exploitation. One such study was conducted in New York by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2008 (Chin, …show more content…
Human trafficking is an illicit and hidden activity and is therefore exceedingly difficult to study” (Turner, 2014). As this quote states, human traffickers operate within a hidden and highly secretive community, which makes gathering data on them very difficult. This represents all the more reason why male victimization should be taken seriously. The statistics that we do have may vastly underestimate the amount of both male and female victims there are globally. What we do know for sure is that human trafficking is a growing epidemic that shows no sign of slowing down and what we shouldn’t do, is believe that we know all there is to know about the issue and overlook any group of people that is effected by human