What Is Human Trafficking?

Human trafficking is a booming multi-billion dollar criminal industry that makes its money based on the exploitation of men, women and children. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime define the trafficking of persons as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation,
It is more than just demoralizing but dehumanizing to be kept in captivity like an animal and be bartered and bought and sold and rented as an inanimate object for regular abuse by sadistic, inhumane criminals but many young naive girls and women often fall into the trap of their abductors and believe that what they are doing is out of love for their captors because they are deceived into believing that that is what love is, distorting their developing perspective of what love, trust, and a normal life looks like. Many juvenile victims do not even identify themselves as victims. Their capture usually starts with the deception of such a lavish lifestyle of money and all things luxurious which leads into coercion of soliciting sex. Up to 300,000 Americans per year are drawn into the world of commercial sex trade. For those that get saved after years of capture from youth to adulthood it becomes hard to see a world outside of that because it is all they ever knew in the years where a person is most easily molded. Many women actually leave the brothel and continue to solicit sex as their main if not only source of income because it is all they know how to do and it seems easiest for them to, and I quote “April” from the CNN
In January of 2015 the Houston Chronicle covered the story of a woman named Rebekah, now 33, that was a victim of human trafficking from the time she was 17 to her imprisonment for prostitution in 2006 when she was 27. Soon after her time was served in 2009 her trafficker was sentenced on a conspiracy indictment and that was when she was finally free of her imprisonment in the life she had been living Rebekah, which remains last-nameless for privacy and protection reasons, touches on the fact that when she was incarcerated they treated her as a criminal which seems to be the peculiar attitude of other women in her same situation seeing as though in CNN’s article, “A heavy toll for the victims of human trafficking” “April” too was very offended by the fact that during her jail time she was seen as a criminal and never got the benefit of the doubt that she was actually the victim in all the madness that had become her life. Recently, a change of heart within the legal system occurred where they leave prostitutes with a lighter sentence if convicted but before that make sure to treat them like the possible victims they are rather than criminals from the get go. The interviewer, Jayme Fraser, goes on to ask Rebekah how her recovery has been in