At the beginning of your day, what do you do?

At the end of your day, where do you go?

Do you feel safe?

It’s important to talk about the intersection between child abuse at home and human trafficking. It’s important to talk about the power dynamic between child and adult, and how an abuse of that power can have dire consequences on that child way beyond the realm of home. According to a representative of The Kristi House, a child advocacy center for the county of Miami-Dade, 80-85% of child trafficking victims were sexually abused at home.

Human trafficking? You mean like the movie Taken?

Although that is a representation of a form of human trafficking, clarifying the definition will show how this affects us domestically. Human trafficking involves exploitation using three main components: force, fraud, or coercion. Sex trafficking involves commercial sex that is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age (National Human Trafficking Hotline Website).

This means we are talking about the protection of children, and the awareness of how abuse leads to abuse. We must acknowledge that many times, in the attempt for a child to escape the conditions at home, they take to the streets.

1 in 3 children that run away from home will be taken into the sex slave industry in only 48 hours.

Child protection begins by teaching children what love is; how to be loved and how to express it to others. In homes where children are being shown that love means sex and fear, these children are the most vulnerable. These are the children that are convinced that they are being offered “love” by pimps, and in fear of losing it, fall prey to the cycle of exploitation and abuse.

This is not a problem for others to worry about. This is not a problem that only affects you once your child, brother, sister, or friend goes missing. This is our problem and it’s happening in our own backyard. It’s an issue that is considered taboo, hiding in our motels, and “gentlemen’s clubs.” We call it prostitution, the women on street corners who do it because they want to, just so we don’t have to take it seriously.

They want to? Tell that to the 14-year-old getting raped by 20 men a night.

Tell that to the 23-year-old, who feels helpless because her pimp threatened her family if she tried to abandon him/her or disobey.

Let’s call it what it is: exploitation, rape, slavery.

I am writing this to take away your out. You can no longer use lack of awareness of the issue or lack of understanding that it is a domestic occurrence as an excuse. My goal isn't to give you the idea that I can provide you with all the information in a small article, but it is to beseech you to educate yourself using the resources available, and in turn educate others.

In a presentation that I was able to be a part of, Agent Victor Williams with the Department of Homeland Security, Human Trafficking division for South Florida, stressed the importance of spreading education on the topic in our communities. We can’t rely on law enforcement to be the sole protectors of our children. This education doesn’t just mean knowing the statistics, it means knowing how you (and I) are partaking in the culture that paints pimps as role models. It means knowing “locker room talk” allows for the objectification of people, and how participating in it means you are part of the problem. It means knowing where your local shelters are, and knowing the signs of human trafficking so that you can possibly save a life.

To end, let’s not forget to mention the third major player in the exploitation triangle of this industry. People talk about the pimps and victims, but do they ever acknowledge the buyers?

This is why this issue is more personal than people would like to realize. If trafficking is being addressed (in this article) as a community problem, we have the pimps who operate in our communities, the children taken from our communities, and so that means the buyers are, unfortunately, the men (and women) in our communities. The buyers who participate in the exploitation and abuse of children should not avoid consequences for their actions due to a lack of public knowledge. Trafficking is a for profit business where everyone benefits except the victim.

Human trafficking affects us all. Therefore, it is all of our responsibility to acknowledge the problem and work toward being part of the solution.

(The use of the word victim is not to discredit the use of the word survivor, where survivors should be labeled as such, but to highlight the fact that there are thousands of children that have yet to be rescued and are still being victimized by this industry.)