Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation is Everyone's Issue

It all started with a casual encounter with a young girl in the church. A brief conversation about a senior project. What evolved over the next several months changed my life forever. My eyes had been opened to a hidden crime that was incurring right here in my own community called human trafficking. A crime that exploits the most vulnerable in society. Traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to lure their victims and force them into labor or commercial sexual exploitation. In the case of this young girl, it was a family member, someone she deeply trusted and loved. Familial trafficking is perhaps one of the most difficult types of domestic sex trafficking to detect.  From an extremely young age, sometimes since birth, violence and abuse become a part of a child’s life, with rape and sexual abuse beginning as young as possible.  Imagine being a child and the adults intended to care for you are not safe. Imagine your mom or dad or even another family member is causing harm to you or allowing someone else to harm you. Imagine that instead of protecting you they are enabling this abuse to happen and often intensifying it themselves. 

This was the first story I heard. My introduction to human trafficking. A topic that many people find difficult to talk about due to the nature of this crime. But I knew I had to do something. The exploitation of women and children is a horrific abuse of human rights. This violence is being done to girls and women in their homes and in their communities.  But what are we supposed to do? Pretend it is not happening? I was not comfortable with that. We do not always get to choose what life will throw at us. Who will care for us? It is especially real and present threat for children in the foster care system who are scared, lonely and desperately seeking connections and relationships, too often without the same adult guidance and oversight as the other children. We, as a society can do more. We must do better to protect those at risk of trafficking and exploitation. Human trafficking is a crime that neither you nor I desire to see happening. We must fight it for our children and the generations to come.