If you think that slavery ended in 1865, think again. Human trafficking is a major problem that affects all continents and humans. When it comes to the victim, there is no discrimination. All ages, ethnicities, and genders are targets.

Children as young as eleven years old are recruited in schools and exploited to sell their bodies. Men and women are tricked into hard labor such as construction with little to no pay in the false hope of obtaining a visa.

The estimated number of human trafficking victims is somewhere between twenty to thirty million and is only on the rise. With the help of technology, the ease of buying and selling a child online is equivalent to ordering takeout from Seamless or Postmates.

If a victim is able to escape the industry, it is likely that they will return to it because of the few resources that are accessible to help them restart their own life. Along with no national approach, there isn’t even a consolidated effort from the law enforcement.

During this year, a ring in New Mexico kept women in dog crates when their bodies weren’t being sold. A trafficker from the circle was under the state’s law enforcement’s radar for a decade and even grabbed the attention of other law enforcement officials outside of New Mexico. The reason for the delay in capture was the lack of knowledge each administration had; they didn’t have intelligence outside their own.

If there was an organized institution or even just a way for departments to communicate with one another, the trafficker would have been imprisoned sooner. Instead, it took the murder and dumping of a victim’s body in a park for officials to finally act.

There’s also the concern of labor exploitation; many dupes aren’t even aware that they’re being misled. Also, due to the shortage of public knowledge, data on labor trafficking is scarce. As a result, consumers can unknowingly support labor trafficking through their purchases and services they utilize.

What’s the solution? To be informed. Although cliché, Francis Bacon’s phrase “Knowledge is power” is an accurate motto to live by in the struggle to tackle modern slavery. If people were to understand how and why trafficking exists and began conversations about it, more protection policies for victims would be created and effective plans against trafficking would be enforced.

For instance, educating youth on the signs of trafficking can help them discover if they or their classmates are in danger. As this matter affects everyone, it is only together that we can resolve it.

For more information:

http://www.deliverfund.org/

https://humantraffickinghotline.org/type-trafficking/labor-trafficking

https://polarisproject.org/typology