Very few crimes are as mentally and physically torturing as the situation that a victim of human trafficking has to endure.  Human trafficking has a devastating impact on individual victims who often suffer physical and emotional abuse, rape, threats against self and family, theft of self identity and worth, and even death. The impact of human trafficking goes beyond individual victims though.   Even today in the twenty-first century according to an article titled "Sex on the Auction Block" by the Detroit Press published Oct. 24, 2004, humans are the third most lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

The U.S. government estimates that approximately 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year; about 14,500-17,500 of them into the United States. Of those trafficked into the United States, it is estimated one-third are children.

What is Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat: it deprives people of their human rights and freedoms, it is a global health risk, and it fuels the growth of organized crime.  Trafficking in persons is a barbaric crime and human rights abuse. The most vulnerable members of the global community, those who have limited access to social services and protections, are targeted by traffickers for exploitation.

Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery, involving victims who are forced, defrauded or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. Annually, about 600,000 to 800,000 people -- mostly women and children -- are trafficked across national borders which does not count millions trafficked within their own countries.

People are absorbed into the darkness of human trafficking by many means. In some cases, physical force is used. For instance in Africa men, women, and children are rounded up after an assault on their village and are trucked off by gun point to diamond quarries and are forced to work as slaves at gun point until many basically die from abuse and exhaustion.  Thus the term blood diamonds.  The forced labor captures lead to villages being slaughtered, women being raped and many men being killed for trying to escape or resisting. In other cases, false promises are made regarding job opportunities or marriages in foreign countries to entrap victims.  Once the victim leaves their family and former life behind they are often enslaved in seat shops, the devastating sex trade or lives as servants.

Victims are forced into prostitution or to work in quarries and sweatshops, on farms, as domestics, as child soldiers, and in many forms of involuntary servitude. Traffickers often target children and young women. They routinely trick victims with promises of employment, educational opportunities, marriage, and a better life.

Even in cases where it appears that the victim collaborated with the trafficker the situation turns incredibly dangerous.  This is very much the case in the smuggling of illegal immigrants into America.  Horror stories of female immigrants being subjected to rape themselves or their children is a price that the illegal immigrants pay in their journey to America in hopes within the possibilities of opportunity.  They have to pay a bounty even after they arrive into America to pay back the coyote smuggler that assisted and in many cases abused them along the way.  Some females are forced to prostitute themselves to pay this debt.  In other arrangements many males are forced to sell drugs to pay their debt.  In these case the hopes of prosperity that attracted them to America has been replaced with fear and constant danger. Others are blackmailed to send money to keep their family protected back home.  

"Trafficking is a transnational criminal enterprise. It recognizes neither boundaries nor borders. Profits from trafficking feed into the coffers of organized crime. Trafficking is fueled by other criminal activities such as document fraud, money laundering and migrant smuggling. Because trafficking cases are expansive in reach, they are among the most important matters - as well as the most labor and time-intensive matters - undertaken by the Department of Justice." Remarks by Attorney General John Ashcroft, in February 2003.

Human Trafficking Statistics

The U.S. government estimates that approximately 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year; about 14,500-17,500 of them into the United States. Of those trafficked into the United States, it is estimated one-third are children. The numbers are alarming but the situation is still even larger as these numbers do not take into account millions trafficked within their own countries.

An estimated 9.5 billion is generated in annual revenue from all trafficking activities, with at least $4 billion attributed to the worldwide brothel industry. Although trafficking is usually associated with poverty, wealthier nations often create demand for victims for their sex industries. Japan is considered the largest market for Asian women trafficked for sex, according to the CATW. In addition, a recent report by the UNODC identified Thailand, Israel, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the U.S. as common destinations. That same report pointed to Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Muldova and the Ukraine among the countries as the greatest sources of trafficked persons.

According to various reports:
• The sex industries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines account for 2 to 14 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of those countries.
• In Japan, where prostitution is not legal but widely tolerated, the sex industry is estimated to make $83 billion. There are an estimated 150,000 foreign women in the sex industry, many of them trafficked from the Philippines, Korea, Russia and Latin America each year.
• In Germany, where prostitution and brothels are legal, an estimated 400,000 prostitutes serve 1.2 million men a day in an industry with an annual turnover of
$18 billion.
• In The Netherlands, the sex industry is estimated to make $1 billion each year

Some observers estimate that as many as 400,000 Vietnamese women and children have been trafficked overseas, most since the end of the Cold War. That's around 10 percent of trafficked women and children worldwide. They are smuggled to Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Czech Republic -- and, to a lesser extent, the United States -- for commercial sexual exploitation.

Testifying "before the Near Eastern and South Asian affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Loy, [U.S.] undersecretary of state for global affairs, said that the number of victims involved in sexual and other forms of trafficking began to grow in the early 1990s and now totals about 700,000 yearly across borders and from 1 million to 2 million overall.  The combined testimony before the subcommittee suggested that the trafficking of women and children, many of whom are forced into prostitution, is a worldwide human rights problem that may involve 2 million people a year ... .The victims are primarily from Asia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Africa. An estimated 1 million children, most of them from Asia, will be victims of trafficking this year. About 500,000 Brazilian children are forced into prostitution each year. An estimated 250,000 women and children from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are transported per year to other countries, including the U.S. Almost 200,000 females, most under 18, from Nepal work in brothels in India." Source: "Sexual Trafficking on the Rise", Christian Century,  Apr 2000

Worldwide, the United Nations estimates that there are between 20-27 million people who are held in slavery, by violence, against their will and for no pay. Source: National MultiCultural Institute (NMCI) Human Trafficking Search Web Portal News Release, February 13, 2006.

Due to the secretive nature of human trafficking, statistics on the magnitude of the problem is a complex and difficult task. The following statistics are the most accurate available, given these complexities, but may represent an underestimation of trafficking on a global and national scale.

Of the 600,000-800,000 people trafficked across international borders each year, 70 percent are female and 50 percent are children. The majority of these victims are forced into the commercial sex trade.

The largest number of people trafficked into the United States come from East Asia and the Pacific (5,000 to 7,000 victims). The next highest numbers come from Latin America and from Europe and Eurasia, with between 3,500 and 5,500 victims from each. (U.S. Departments of Justice, Health & Human Services, State, Labor, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. 2004. Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.)

Human Trafficking Stories Exposed

March 2005 Bahamas  Exploratory research on human trafficking has exposed an intricate network, involving key players in the Bahamas, newspaper advertisements abroad and unscrupulous persons willing to exploit desperate citizens from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.  The study has concluded that people throughout the Caribbean are lured into multiple forms of exploitation including forced labour, domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. According to the International Organization for Migration´s preliminary assessment on The Bahamas, attempting to delineate legitimate opportunities from those that are not is an extremely daunting task.  “Haitian migration to The Bahamas and Guyanese migration to Barbados is believed to be perpetrated by advertisements from agencies promising opportunities for employment. Some Jamaican newspapers carry telephone numbers that a person can call to arrange a trip out of country,’ said the report, discussed at a pivotal Organization of American States meeting.  According to the information that was gleaned from interviewees in Abaco, which has one of the largest immigrant populations in The Bahamas, the captains of boats and planes go to places like Haiti and the Dominican Republic advertising jobs in The Bahamas including the opening of large farms needing workers. They also advertise free health care, the study reported, as a way of getting people to make the journey.  Information mentioned in the IOM study from Eleuthera sources indicated that boat owners who are complicit in the illegal migration trade generally make large sums of money; as much as $5,000 per trip

September 2008 Thailand  MEY Say is calm and matter-of-fact when he describes his attempt to migrate to Thailand in search of work. "I was cheated," he says, miserably. "There were 18 of us and we could only eat three cans of fish a day. We couldn't go outside as there were many Thai soldiers guarding us. If we came out, they would shoot us."  Mey Say's grim story - he thought he was going to be a factory worker but then was taken into remote jungle and made to cut cassava - is one of many now being told as NGOs and government officials seek to draw attention to the largely under-reported area of the illegal trafficking and exploitation of Cambodian men overseas.  Cambodian men who are willingly smuggled into countries such as Thailand for work often find themselves subjected to conditions of forced labour in the fishing, construction and agricultural industries.

September 2008 London Free Press  Eve was working at a fast food restaurant when one of her "regulars" walked in.  It had been months since Eve escaped from two and a half years of sexual slavery -- sold to a dozen men a day, around the clock and through her period, every penny passed to her trafficker.  "I started hyperventilating. I just freaked out. Because I don't want anything to do with them and it brings flashbacks back," Eve, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, says of the encounter during a recent interview about her human trafficking case. "The feelings come flooding back in. Feeling scared. Feeling like I just want to get out of there. Nervous. Uncomfortable. Hurt."  Eve was 12 when she ran away from foster care and ended up in an escort agency. From agency to pimp to pimp she went until she met the man who pleaded guilty in May to trafficking her.   She speaks a little louder than she did six months ago, just three months out of the flesh trade then. And today her hair is yet another color, yet another style. Lots of changes since she was held up at gunpoint in that motel room just outside Toronto, a moment that jerked her past the threats of her trafficker and into a police station. She spent her 18th birthday in hiding, shuffled through jobs, got a place of her own and went back to school -- just 22 credits to go for her high school diploma. She wants to be a social worker.  Hers is the first human trafficking conviction in Canadian history. A ground-breaking case that didn't involve cross-border movement or a container ship of illegal aliens

February 2007 Sing Tao Daily  "Thank you" is one of the first things reporter Liz Chow remembers saying to the 17-year-old girl who became a critical source for Chow's award-winning story on human trafficking in the United States.  Chow commended the woman for revealing how she was lured from her home in rural China at age 14 with the promise of earning $3,000 a month. The scared victim--whom Chow called "Sara" (a pseudonym) in her story--told of being locked in a basement in New York City and assaulted, then forced to work 14-hour days, six days a week for meager wages to pay off her captors. After three years, in 2005, "Sara" escaped. Last year, "Sara" shared her story with Chow, a 30-year-old crime reporter for the Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily in New York. Chow used "Sara's" story to add a human element to a piece inspired by statistics from the State Department's Trafficking in Persons report.

December 2002 St. Petersburg Times Florida  They picked buckets of fruit from sunup to sundown. A seven-day week in the citrus groves might bring in $15. Hired hands on tractors drove up and down the rows of orange trees, watching their every move. Escape, they were told, would bring a beating or a bullet.  The same thing happened to me," Martinez said. "I didn't know who to trust and who not to trust."  Martinez managed to escape the human trafficking networks that each year snatch tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants from desolate stretches along the U.S. border with Mexico.  Now, for scores of workers at Florida farms, sweatshops and brothels, Martinez represents hope. He and other members of the Coalition for Immokalee Workers, a grassroots organization trying to improve conditions on Florida farms, counsel trafficking victims and play a key role in pressing criminal cases under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Martinez-Cervantes, 44, runs a taxi-van service in Immokalee. Every Tuesday, he heads out on five-day journeys to pick up migrant farm workers at labor camps in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. He is the eyes and ears of a modern day underground railroad.

"We drive a long time sometimes," Martinez-Cervantes said, "so we hear these stories of people who are being held against their will. Sometimes I bring those people to the coalition and explain their situation can be remedied."  It was his travels that alerted him to the Ramos brothers' trafficking ring.  He and his co-worker Alejandro Benitez, 22, spent hours on the witness stand describing the night in May 2000 when the Ramos brothers and several of their workers held them at gunpoint.  The brothers accused Martinez-Cervantes of helping workers escape the farm. Before he could reply, Martinez-Cervantes said he felt the butt of a pistol crash down on his skull. A second blow cut a wide gash across his mouth.  "I lost consciousness after they pistol-whipped me," he said.  Days before the Ramos' sentencing on Nov. 20, Martinez-Cervantes said he was too afraid of reprisals to attend the court proceedings, but he was sure justice would be done. "Now maybe the farm contractors will realize that they better straighten up," Martinez said

March 2004, a Taiwanese tried to sell three young Vietnamese women on E-bay. The starting bid was $5,400. Vietnamese living abroad protested, and E-Bay quickly pulled the auction page. But the language used on that page, along with the images of the three young, hapless women smiling to the camera, bespoke of modern-day slavery: "Products will be delivered only to Taiwan," the page said.

Saudia Arabia (reported by Dallas Daily News November 2006)  He met her in a Starbucks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. While the story she told was gut wrenching, it wasn't unlike those he'd heard countless times over the past four years. Nour Miyati, an Indonesian woman in her 20s, had come to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic servant. But her dream of supporting her family back home turned into a nightmare.  Her employers abused and tortured her. She lost fingers and toes to gangrene when the wounds from her beatings went untreated and festered. When she escaped and sought justice in a Saudi court, she was sentenced to 79 lashes. "It was heart-rending," John Miller said of his meeting with Ms. Miyati.
A former congressman from Washington state, Mr. Miller has traveled the world as the head of the State Department's office to monitor and combat human trafficking. But after visiting 50 countries since 2002 and meeting, by his count, more than 1,000 survivors of 21st-century slavery, Mr. Miller is moving on.  Most are victims of sex trafficking, winding up as prostitutes in countries from the Dominican Republic to Japan. Others are forced to become beggars, child soldiers or camel jockeys. Still others are forced to work in sweatshops 20 hours a day or are trapped in involuntary servitude as construction or domestic workers.  He met an 11-year-old who worked in an embroidery factory in Southeast Asia whose owner poured acid on her and shot her. He met a man in India who was an indentured servant at a brick mill because his grandfather had borrowed 20 or 30 rupees years before. In Amsterdam, he met a Czech woman who was forced into prostitution after being told she'd never see her 2-year-old daughter again if she didn't cooperate.

The Human Trafficking Sex Trade

In Saigon, Vietnam.  A typical trafficking scenario in Saigon, Vietnam goes something like this: A group of men come in from a foreign country, Taiwan or Korea, perhaps, and are chauffeured to a designated bar where young women and teenage girls await. The girls are lined up. The men pick and choose their brides, and pay around $5,000 to $10,000 dollars depending on the "quality" of the bride, which depends largely on whether she is a virgin. Soon these so-called brides are taken to unknown destinies. Their families back in the rural areas receive around $500 dollars for the sale. The rest goes to middlemen and to grease the legal machine. Girls and women may also be promised jobs in Cambodia, Laos or China, only to end up as sex slaves once they cross the border. Recent raids in Cambodian brothels came up with Vietnamese girls as young as 5 years old.

In San Francisco, CA  Navigating past the junkies and hustlers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, You Mi Kim found the metal security door she was looking for, and pressed the buzzer. Inside Sun Spa massage parlor, the manager saw You Mi on the surveillance camera and threw some sea salt over the threshold -- a Korean practice to ward off bad luck.  It was July 2003. It had been five months since You Mi was lured from her home in South Korea by international sex traffickers, who had tricked the debt-ridden college student with promises of a high-paying hostess job in America.  After forcing her into sex work to pay them nearly $20,000, the traffickers had finally let her go. But freedom was elusive.   affickers had taken all her earnings, yet she still faced a $40,000 shopping debt back home -- the reason she left for an American job that promised big pay. Now, no fewer than six creditors were circling her family in South Korea.

Any kind of job she could get as an illegal immigrant -- cleaning homes or washing dishes in a restaurant -- wouldn't pay her debts in time. She wanted to protect her family from the shame of bankruptcy. She wanted her life back.  You Mi felt she had no choice.  On her first day of freedom, she took an unlicensed Korean taxi from Los Angeles to another illicit massage parlor in San Francisco.  The door of the Sun Spa opened. The manager, a Korean woman in her 50s, led You Mi inside and quickly handed her off to the masseuse with the most seniority.  For the next four months, You Mi would become a person she never imagined. She and five other sex workers would share a dingy apartment on O'Farrell Street across from the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre. She'd spend her waking hours at Sun Spa, having sex with more than a dozen men a day, six days a week, and scurrying into secret hideaways during police raids.  She would find the rumors about San Francisco to be true: It was a booming stop on the international sex-trafficking route. There was lots of money to be made. Customers plentiful, tips great.  But first, she would have to surrender her last shred of dignity.  To Read the Rest of this story go to DIARY OF A SEX SLAVE

In Planefield, NJ  On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security).  The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.  It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico.