Sex Trafficking Is Still Very Much A Problem

Let’s play a game. If you can answer any of these questions in more than one sentence, feel free to ignore this article: 

1. Without searching it up, tell me what you know about human trafficking?
2. When’s the last time you heard it in the news?
3. When’s the last time you’ve seen it on your timeline and actually clicked the article to read up on it?

Wasn’t that fun? Now if you failed miserably at this pop quiz, here are the answers to those three serious questions:

According to Equality Now, an organization that works to protect and promote the human rights of girls and women all around the world, at least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide for sex. Ninety eight percent of those victims are women and young girls, but boys are also forced into this lifestyle as well.

Since 1992, Equality Now has channeled their energy and focus into four main programs: discrimination in law, sexual violence, female genital mutilation (FGM), and trafficking. They’ve been trying their best to target the problem areas human trafficking stems from and branches out into.

But, before the help of Equality Now and other great organizations, trafficking was simply made possible by the promotion of prostitution, which ran rampant in incidences like the NY-based Big Apple Oriented Tours in 1996. There are even discrimination laws which give leeway to the exploitation of women and girls. Many of us probably have assumed that this only happens in third world countries, but statistics shows that it even goes on right here at home.

Unfortunately, this is one of the uglier, more terrifying faces related to women’s rights, and yet many people here in the States still presume that women are only constantly nagging for better jobs and equal pay.

I mean of course we’d like the top executive positions that pay six figures plus, but we’d also like to be considered human beings who deserve their rights to be respected. Throughout our history, we’ve watched as women played the supporting role to the sex that is actually fewer in the world compared to women. Then slowly but surely, we became not second best, but barely listed.

Gladly cut off without a voice and ignored without recognition.

The Black Lives Matter movement was engulfed in mass media for months, and it woke up our country. It brought a whole new meaning to being Black in the new millennium. Part of this movement’s issue was discrimination and the lack of proper humane rights. Human trafficking also suffers from this, but unfortunately isn’t blown up in the media like the Black Lives Matter movement was.

What will it take for a raise in awareness, followed by a corporation of every person, to join in the fight to stop this and help these victims gain back their rights to live?

When will we realize that this is a serious issue worth protesting and rallying for?

These are the innocent. Suffering. Dying. Having no say-so in their lives, no right of choice.

I will pose another question to you, but not in the form of a game question, just an honest one:

What will you do about this?