Dana Bernardino
Walking through the streets of New York City, you’re surrounded by all types of people. As you move from block to block, it feels like you’re passing by an endless stream of faces who come from every background you can imagine. The city that never sleeps boasts a population of over 8.4 million, which is obviously a lot of people.
But what if I told you that nearly five times that many people are victims of human trafficking?
1Huddle is committed to powering all workers and creating diverse, equitable workplaces where everyone gets a fair shot to succeed. But that can’t happen until we work together to end all forms of modern-day slavery, which is one of the reasons why we’ve partnered with Saving Jane. Saving Jane is a nonprofit that works to prevent and end human trafficking and empower survivors by raising awareness and educating people across the world about the dangers of trafficking.
Here are the top nine facts you need to know about human trafficking:
Human trafficking, which is defined as “a form of modern day slavery that profits from the exploitation of our most vulnerable populations,” affects more than 40.3 million victims worldwide.
This includes over 16 million victims of labor exploitation, 4.8 million victims of sexual exploitation, and 4.1 million victims of state-imposed forced labor.
This heinous crime is one of the world’s biggest markets.
In fact, human trafficking is the third-largest crime industry globally. Traffickers earn global profits of roughly $150 billion dollars every year, $99 billion of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation.
And the problem is getting worse.
The number of trafficking victims and survivors who contacted the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline increased by nearly 20% in 2019. Since the hotline launched in 2007, more than 63,000 cases of human trafficking in America have been identified, with steady increases in the number of people trafficked each year.
Over the course of the pandemic, the situation has turned even more dire.
Human trafficking is growing—and it’s growing fast.
The United Nations General Assembly recognized that “despite sustained measures taken at the international, regional and national levels, trafficking in persons remains one of the grave challenges facing the international community.”
And over the course of the pandemic, the situation has gotten worse. Children’s susceptibility to exploitation has increased at an even higher trajectory than usual over the past year, because millions of young people are spending more time than ever on social media.
Since COVID started, the amount of time children and teens spend on entertainment media has soared by over 60%— which means youth students of all ages are now spending more time on their phones, where they are more likely to encounter traffickers and trafficking schemes.
The term “human trafficking” is wide-reaching, and extends into several different forms of forced labor, servitude, and slavery that victims are forced into.
The three most common types of trafficking situations in the U.S. are: Sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and sex and labor trafficking. Most sex trafficking victims are forced into escort services, the illicit massage, health, and beauty industry, and pornography. Whereas the most common types of labor trafficking come in the form of domestic work, agriculture and animal husbandry, and traveling sales crews.
Some traffickers use victims to remove and sell organs or engage in warfare and forced marriages. Equally alarming is the fact that many trafficked children are used as a tool to trick other children into trafficking. The United Nations refers to trafficking as “the hidden figure of crime,” since traffickers so often use their victims to do their crimes for them.
Sadly, assessing the full scope of human trafficking is incredibly difficult because cases so often go undetected and traffickers are hard to catch.
Few people realize that trafficking occurs in their own neighborhoods.
America’s sex trafficking laws and regulations vary widely by state, and 35 states do not have laws prohibiting the criminalization of youth who have been trafficked. This has led to a culture where many trafficking victims are blamed for the acts they were forced to commit by traffickers.
Shared Hope International, an organization that works to help end sex trafficking, found that: “Young sex trafficking victims are treated as criminals and suffer unjust, traumatizing consequences, such as search, arrest, and detention, which intensifies their trauma, sends the message that they are responsible for the violence committed against them, and produces a distrust of the justice system.”
Worldwide, 71% of sex trafficking victims are women and girls, while men and boys account for 29% of trafficking victims. When it comes to victims who are forced to cross borders into the trafficking industry, the U.S. State Department estimates that 80% of internationally trafficked victims are female. Of those, 70% are trafficked into the sex industry.
So while trafficking predominately impacts women and girls, it’s important to remember that every gender and people of all gender identities are victims of this multi-billion dollar industry.
While most stereotypes depict trafficking victims as young women and girls who are kidnapped and forced into the sex industry, the truth is that gender is not the main trait defining someone’s likelihood of becoming a victim of human trafficking. Thousands of men, women, and children of all ages become victims of trafficking every year, in every country in the world.
Traffickers specifically seek out victims who are vulnerable or disadvantaged. The eight most common risk factors that trafficking victims share are:
We know these statistics are bleak.
Raising awareness of human trafficking Facts and trafficking victims is more important than ever, but learning about the millions of people worldwide who are forced into modern-day slavery can be difficult to deal with.
The good news is that there is hope. 1Huddle is working with Saving Jane to help bring an end to human trafficking Facts by launching our game platform to thousands of students at more than 100 New Jersey schools.
Since students are spending more time than ever before on their phones, transforming sex trafficking education into a mobile-first gaming format is the perfect way to expand awareness to students of all ages and backgrounds so that we can end trafficking and exploitation in America.
At 1Huddle, we fight for all workers, and that starts with fighting for our young people. The 60,000 children who are victims of child sex trafficking in the U.S. each year are our country’s future and the workers of tomorrow. Using our game platform to help end human trafficking is just one step toward creating a better, more equitable, safer future for America’s children and workers.
To learn more about our partnership with Saving Jane, head over to our partnership press release.
Dana Bernardino, Manager of Digital Marketing at 1Huddle
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