Could you ever envision yourself being bound into hopeless, permanent slavery? No way to escape. No hope of ever being rescued. Knowing your entire, remaining life will consist of being forced to work seven days a week in the worst possible conditions.
Now, what if that was your child? Imagine the pain of them going missing one morning and not having any idea of how to rescue them. Your child will never tell you they are about to be trafficked – and that’s the worst thing that could happen.
While children from economically disadvantaged families are the most prone to trafficking, it can even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods or schools. Once in the hands of a trafficker, odds are very poor of being rescued without severe emotional and/or physical injuries.
How can human trafficking happen?
Traffickers have dozens of ways of pulling children and teens from their homes.
The fastest is simply kidnapping a child – maybe left for a moment in a car, a shopping cart or walking alone in a strange area. A ten-year study found 9,872 attempted abductions of children, many while they were simply walking to school.
Drug-related exploitation is sadly becoming too common as opioid addiction increases, where parents or caregivers will unbelievably sell or trade their children for drugs or money.
Runaways are probably the most vulnerable. Traffickers have learned the typical signs of a runaway and lurk in malls and bus stations, looking for those tell-tale behavioral signs. Often, simply the promise of food and a place to sleep are all it takes to convince a homeless child to leave with a trafficker. Statistics from 2015 showed that 540,000 minors either ran away or were put out of the home by their families. That’s almost 1,500 vulnerable children per day, or 30 children in every state, every day. Some estimates are five times that high (www.youth.gov.)
Finally, online exploitation continues to rise with more than 10.2 million reports in 2017 alone. Online enticement is a broad category of online exploitation, including sextortion, in which a child is being groomed to take sexually explicit images and/or ultimately meet face-to-face with someone for sexual purposes.
The worst is yet to come
Once in the hands of sex traffickers, children as young as 12 years old may be threatened with personal harm to themselves or to their family unless they agree to participate in the sex trade. Often, drugs are introduced to make them completely dependent on their captors and they are psychologically manipulated in such a way that they never try to escape.
What can be done?
Being aware of the problem is step one, so thanks for reading. Step two is making your children aware of the dangers and discussing how to stay safe.
For starters, here’s a link to Protecting your kids online 2.0 and another on identifying trafficking victims. Please review our other articles on SHT.website for more stories about Stopping Human Trafficking. And, please leave comments below if you have more ideas for keeping your family safe. We need to keep this discussion going.
Other articles on SHT.website that may be of interest:
Make a friend – save a trafficking victim
Help is available in Cleveland for those in need; trafficked, abused, homeless, addicted
Look Beneath the Surface – would you recognize someone being trafficked?
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