The Facts About Human Trafficking

Human trafficking will cease only to exist if we begin the process of educating ourselves to spot the signs that indicate that a person has been trafficked and is being held against their will.

Human Trafficking is: 

1. Sex Trafficking: in which a commercial sex act 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.
2. The Recruitment: harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

2. Methods of Control: 

1. Force (physical assault, sexual assault, rape, gang rape, and physical confinement and isolation).
2. Fraud (false employment offers, lying about work conditions, false promises, withholding wages)
3. Coercion (Any threats to life, safety, to family members or similar parties. Threats involving immigration status or arrest. Withholding legal documents like passports and visas. Climate of fear. Psychological abuse.)

3. Facts: 

• 600, 000 - 800,000 individuals are trafficked across international borders each year.
• 14, 500 – 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the US each year for both sexual and labor exploitation.
• 1 percent of victims have been officially identified in the US (total as of April 2005 = 720).
• There are NO official figures regarding the amount of US citizens who are currently enslaved.
• 450,000 children run away from home each year; 1 in 3 teens on the street will be lured towards prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
• Sex trafficking has been documented as a major contributor to the worldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic.
• Human trafficking is the 3^rd largest crime industry in the US; it may be the largest in ten years.
• If you have an interstate highway or an airport in your state, you are a border state for traffickers(395, 95.
• Trafficking investigations have been initiated in all 50 states; trafficking cases have been reported in 91 cities.
• CT examples: Foxwoods (Debt Bondage; pay a price for being brought into the US), Waterbury (Dunkin Donuts), Darien (Micheline Slattery from Haiti).

• Commercial sexual exploitation/Prostitution
• Exotic dancing/Stripping/Pornography
• Domestic work and child care (“domestic servitude”)
• Factory work/Sweatshops
• Agricultural work
• Landscape work
• Restaurants
• Construction labor
• Servile Marriages/International Marriage Brokers
• Hotel housekeeping
• Day labor
• False adoption