I've recently been seeing an uptick in different tweets and other posts on social media about young women who have gone missing. Curious to see whether this was true or just in my own feed, I did some of my own research.

The headlines all began with the missing college student from Iowa, Mollie Tibbetts, who vanished on July 18. As people began to hear about her disappearance, they started to look into other disappearances. With this, a claim was made that Iowa has seen an uptick in the number of missing children reports that same week alone. Although this claim was proved to be not out of the ordinary for reports, it all brought me to the issue of human trafficking.

Human trafficking seems like something that would happen only in movies, or to people in other countries, never here in the U.S., right?

In the United States, it is estimated that 57,000 people were victims of human trafficking in 2016 alone. Along with this, approximately 200,000 American youth are at risk for trafficking every year.

People hear these numbers and are confused by how something like this could happen in the United States. Typically, young women are lured in by people who are offering them jobs like being a nanny for wealthy families, modeling or jobs in the entertainment industry. These promises quickly turn out to be false and before they know it, it's too late to get out.

There are many organizations that work to stop human trafficking and help get people out and continue to help them once they're out. These include Polaris, National Human Trafficking Hotline, and Not for Sale.

We have to work hard here in the U.S. to challenge the "it happens over there, not here mentality."

Human trafficking is modern slavery and an issue that needs to be attacked.