Institution
Domestic and International Human Sex Trafficking
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Domestic and International Human Sex Trafficking
Introduction
Human trafficking is a modern day form of slavery that entails the trade or transportation of individuals for the purpose of forced labor. Human trafficking affects persons of all backgrounds with different people being trafficked for different purposes. Children are usually trafficked into manual labor positions in fishing, agriculture and textile industries for child labor, while men, on the other hand,often get trafficked into hard manuallabor employment. The most common form of human trafficking is however sex trafficking that mainly involves women and young girls. Human sex trafficking is the process of harboring, transporting, recruiting or obtaining a person for commercial sex purposes. The women and girls are subjected to unlawful acts such as prostitution and other types of sexual exploitation. Sex traffickers usually use fraud, excessive force and coercionto induce their victims into commercial sex acts and they mainly target young girls that have not reached the age of 18 yearsyet. The victims are always confined, transported to different countries against their consent, drugged, verbally abused, physically abused, and forced to engage in commercial sex.
Current Statistics on Victims of Sex Trafficking in the US and Internationally
Despite human sex trafficking being anillegal crime and a serious infringement of human rights, each year thousands of women, children and men fall prey to traffickers both in their local countries and abroad. Almost every nation in the world is affected by sex trafficking; independent of an origin of the sex victims, passage of the victims or destination of the trafficked victims. Recent reports show that currently 20.9 million people globally are involved in employment that they were deceived or coerced and are not in a position to leave. 90% of them, which accounts for 18.7 million people, are beingtrapped into forced labor in the private sector where they areexploited by enterprises or individuals. Out of the total population 4.5 million people are enslaved in forced commercial sex work. Women and young girls represent the larger share of these sex victims of 80% as compared to the men and boys who only represent 20% of the total population. In the United States alone the National Human Trafficking Resource Centre that is operated by Polaris reported 3,598 cases of sex trafficking within the country in 2014. Every year approximately 800,000 children and women are trafficked across the international borders with a substantial number of girls and women being trafficked within states. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has also revealed the shocking news that one out of every six runawaychildren are most likely victims of sex trafficking.
Methods of Sex Trafficking
The sex traffickers use a variety of tactics to manipulate and coerce their victims into sex trafficking process. The most commonly used method by the traffickers is giving the victims a false promise of getting them education, a good job or citizenship in a rich foreign country. Some of the victims are also offered fake marriage proposals in order to lure them into leaving their country of residence for a foreign country. However, once the victims arrive in the foreign countries the traffickers reveal their true identities and they become helpless facing the situation because they do not know anybody. This is popularly known as the debt bondage where the victim is made to believe that they owe the trafficker for transporting them into a foreign country and covering their living expenses. The victims are then forced to pledge their personal service as a means of repaying their debt. Another method used in sex trafficking is kidnapping. This method is mostly used on young adolescents and children who get enticed by either food or toys into vans parked in isolated street corners. The traffickers then use threats, physical and verbal violence into forcing the victims to engage in commercial sex. Traumatic bonding is also another method that is quite common with many traffickers. In this case the trafficker first identifies very poor families and approaches them seeking to buy young women and girls with the promise of offering them better lives abroad. Once in the foreign country, young women are instilled with massive fear and gratitude for the privilege of living. The girls become very submissiveand allow themselves to be used for any form of sexual exploitation. Research has however showed that not all victims of sex trafficking are kidnapped by the traffickers, some victims are actually sold by significant others, husbands and even sometimes parents.
Recruitment Methods into Sex Trafficking
Traffickers, or pimps,normally target potential victims,who are either socially or economically vulnerable,forpurposes of recruitment into the sex trade.This group includes girls and young women who are subjected to poverty, drug abuse, family violence, societal isolation, abusive childhood, family dysfunction, criminal past, and school failure. The pimps can also target young orphans and women who are physically disabled. The victims are then recruited through either guerrilla or finesse pimping. Finesse pimping is the most preferredrecruitment means and it involves kindness, compassion, and psychological tricks such as enticing the victims with clothes, cash, food, shelter, drugs, and gifts that leave them feeling indebted or obligated to the pimp. Guerrilla pimping, on the other hand, involves the use of intimidation, threats, aggression, and violence to recruit and enslave the victims.
The Impact of Social Media on Sex Trafficking
The Internet and social media platforms are commonly used by traffickers as tools to facilitate human sex trafficking. The Internet is an easy way for the traffickers to find their victims. Internet providesthe traffickers with an easy connection to their potential victims, the traffickers make use of the networking technologies to identify and target vulnerable youth. Technology and social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have provided sex traffickers with an opening to recruit naive adolescents from previously unreachable areas. This has helped fastening the process of recruiting victims for human sex trafficking. These sites have made it easy for traffickers to access girls from Central America and Mexico who are then lured by the pimps to come to the US by covering travelling expenditures, only for them to end up as forced commercial sex workers.
The Society’s View on Human Sex Trafficking
The society has been very loud in condemning the acts of human sex trafficking. It considers it to be a very inhumane act that violates all aspects of human rights. The religious groups have specifically been in the forefront of organizing campaigns to criticize this inhuman act and force the state to act fast on the issue that is becoming a society menace. The society views sex trafficking asan act of moral degradation that is spreading immorality within the society. Our society is urged to point at the victims of human sex trafficking by giving judging them as prostitutes. The society just views the girlsas moral hazards to the community without noticing that most of these girls are just victims who are being forced to practice commercial sex. These girls are not prostitutes but sex slaves who are held captives by the pimps who control and use them as sex workers for their own profits. The sad truth is that most of these girls do not work for a paycheck or a profit.
Insight on the Victims of Sex Trafficking
An insight into the lives of the victims has also revealed that contrary to popular belief that these girls are only used for prostitution, they are also forced into stripping, live sex shows, military prostitution, sexual tourism, exotic dancing, and pornography. Most of these girls have suffered lots of psychological traumas and so much physical abuse that some of them have even lost touch with the persons they used to be before the ordeal. A large percentage of these girls believe they can never go back to the people they used to be, they even fear facing the society out of shame.
PreventionMethods, Intervention Methods and Programs for the Victims and the ‘Johns’
One method of preventing sex trafficking is through the government putting into place policies that will ensure zero tolerance for the sex traffickers and the ‘johns’. The two groups should face the full force of the law if caught in the act. The other method that can be effective is raising awareness on what sex trafficking entails and the awful treatments that the victims encounter. Intervention methods include using of sex trafficking survivors to identify the pimps and the ‘johns’ so that they can be charged in a court of law. Another intervention method is the government providing basic needs for the poor so that they are not lured into sex trafficking. The state can also offer programs such as educational and prevention programs, advocacy programs, mental health programs and social programs in a bid to sensitize the both the sex victims and the ‘johns’.
The greatest problem is that most Americans assume that human sex trafficking does not happen on the American soil. Majority of Americansperceives the issue of sex trafficking as a third world problem affecting countries such as China, Singapore, Russia and Thailand. But the reality is that this is everyone’s problem including the United States. Human sex trafficking is one of the fastest expanding illegal trades at the moment.
