Human trafficking is the euphemism used for slavery used during the 21st century. Earning a total annual income of roughly $9 billion a year, human trafficking is the most profitable criminal industry in the world. A friend of mine first told me about the issue of human trafficking about a year ago or so, but it wasn’t until a classmate in my International Relations class did a presentation for the rest of the class did I realize how big this problem is. Between 2 million and 4 million people are trafficked across international borders every single year, the majority of which are women and children who are forced into the sex trade where they may be forced to have sex up to 20 times a day. According to the CIA, one woman alone will result in profits of around $250,000/year.

Human traffickers obtain their victims a number of ways, including kidnapping and luring young women  to leave the country willingly with promises of modeling or waitressing jobs. After taking their documentation and putting the girls in a hotel for the night, men dressed in police uniforms will storm her room and brutally gang rape her. This is initiation. On top of that, many victims end up in slavery as a payment for family debts.

The United Nations released a report in 2006 entitles Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns, in which it stated that approximately 1.8 millions children are part of the commercial human trafficking industry. These children are forced into hard labour, marriage, illicit adoptions, begging and sex trafficking. Girls as young as 12 years old are forced into prostitution, brothels, “massage parlors”, strip clubs and pornography. Children who are forced to beg are often maimed by their captors to generate sympathy.

Victims of human trafficking have to deal with a number of health problems such as: malnutrition, sleep deprivation, beatings, emotional abuse, forced abortions, a total lack of health care, STI’s, and children lack a basic education or parental figures, so they are completely dependant on their captors.

The United Nations reports that Western Europe contains a large number of destination countries for human trafficking including: Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The main source of victims for these countries is Eastern European nations such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

So What Can I Do About It?

When people first hear these statistics, they are shocked and often feel overwhelmed. How can you possibly help stop something this massive? The first, and most important thing, you can possibly do is spread the word about this. We can’t do anything to stop this epidemic if nobody knows about it. Send people a link to this post, as well as the A21 Campaign Website, write your own blog posts and make videos about the issue and put them on YouTube. The second thing you can do is lobby your government to do more to stop human trafficking. If you live in Canada, contact your MP, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, asking them to do more, both at home and abroad to help stop this atrocity. The third thing you can do is to buy Fair Trade whenever possible. Buying Fair Trade ensures that those that you purchase from get a fair wage and decent working conditions. If you buy Fair Trade, you will send the message that you are not willing to support slave trade any longer.