Facts about Human Trafficking - Energetic Synthesis

Facts about Human Trafficking

Approximately 75-80% of human trafficking is for sex.
Researchers note that sex trafficking plays a major role in the spread of HIV.
There are more human slaves in the world today than ever before in history.
There are an estimated 27 million adults and 13 million children around the world who are victims of human trafficking.
Human traffickers often use a Sudanese phrase “use a slave to catch slaves,” meaning traffickers send “broken-in girls” to recruit younger girls into the sex trade. Sex traffickers often train girls themselves, raping them and teaching them sex acts.
People are often trafficked for their organs
Human trafficking not only involves sex and labor, but people are also trafficked for organ harvesting.
Eighty percent of North Koreans who escape into China are women. Nine out of 10 of those women become victims of human trafficking, often for sex. If the women complain, they are deported back to North Korea, where they are thrown into gulags or are executed.
An estimated 30,000 victims of sex trafficking die each year from abuse, disease, torture, and neglect. Eighty percent of those sold into sexual slavery are under 24, and some are as young as six years old.
Ludwig “Tarzan” Fainberg, a convicted trafficker, said, “You can buy a woman for $10,000 and make your money back in a week if she is pretty and young. Then everything else is profit.”[12]
A human trafficker can earn 20 times what he or she paid for a girl. Provided the girl was not physically brutalized to the point of ruining her beauty, the pimp could sell her again for a greater price because he had trained her and broken her spirit, which saves future buyers the hassle. A 2003 study in the Netherlands found that, on average, a single sex slave earned her pimp at least $250,000 a year.
Although human trafficking is often a hidden crime and accurate statistics are difficult to obtain, researchers estimate that more than 80% of trafficking victims are female. Over 50% of human trafficking victims are children.
The end of the Cold War has resulted in the growth of regional conflicts and the decline of borders. Many rebel groups turn to human trafficking to fund military actions and garner soldiers.
According to a 2009 Washington Times article, the Taliban buys children as young as seven years old to act as suicide bombers. The price for child suicide bombers is between $7,000-$14,000.
Many children are trafficked to serve in armed conflicts around the world
UNICEF estimates that 300,000 children younger than 18 are currently trafficked to serve in armed conflicts worldwide.
More than 30% of all trafficking cases in 2007-2008 involved children being sold into the sex industry.
The Western presence in Kosovo, such as NATO troops and civilians, have fueled the rapid growth of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Amnesty International has reported that NATO soldiers, UN police, and Western aid workers “operated with near impunity in exploiting the victims of the sex traffickers.”
Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video is about human trafficking. In the video, Gaga is trafficked by a Russian bathhouse into sex slavery.
Human trafficking is the only area of transnational crime in which women are significantly represented—as victims, as perpetrators, and as activists fighting this crime.
Global warming and severe natural disasters have left millions homeless and impoverished, which has created desperate people easily exploited by human traffickers.
Over 71% of trafficked children show suicidal tendencies.
After sex, the most common form of human trafficking is forced labor. Researchers argue that as the economic crisis deepens, the number of people trafficked for forced labor will increase.[11]
Most human trafficking in the United States occurs in New York, California, and Florida.
According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), over the past 30 years, over 30 million children have been sexually exploited through human trafficking.
Human traffickers often target young victims via the Internet.
Sex traffickers often recruit children because not only are children more unsuspecting and vulnerable than adults, but there is also a high market demand for young victims. Traffickers target victims on the telephone, on the Internet, through friends, at the mall, and in after-school programs.
Several countries rank high as source countries for human trafficking, including Belarus, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Albania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania, China, Thailand, and Nigeria.
Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey, and the U.S. are ranked very high as destination countries of trafficked victims.
Women are trafficked to the U.S. largely to work in the sex industry (including strip clubs, peep and touch shows, massage parlors that offer sexual services, and prostitution). They are also trafficked to work in sweatshops, domestic servitude, and agricultural work.
Sex traffickers use a variety of ways to “condition” their victims, including subjecting them to starvation, rape, gang rape, physical abuse, beating, confinement, threats of violence toward the victim and victim’s family, forced drug use, and shame.
Family members will often sell children and other family members into slavery; the younger the victim, the more money the trafficker receives. For example, a 10-year-old named Gita was sold into a brothel by her aunt. The now 22-year-old recalls that when she refused to work, the older girls held her down and stuck a piece of cloth in her mouth so no one would hear her scream as she was raped by a customer. She would later contract HIV.
Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises because it holds relatively low risk with high profit potential. Criminal organizations are increasingly attracted to human trafficking because, unlike drugs, humans can be sold repeatedly.
Human trafficking is estimated to surpass the drug trade in less than five years. Journalist Victor Malarek reports that it is primarily men who are driving human trafficking, specifically trafficking for sex.[9]
Victims of human trafficking suffer devastating physical and psychological harm. However, due to language barriers, lack of knowledge about available services, and the frequency with which traffickers move victims, human trafficking victims and their perpetrators are difficult to catch.
In approximately 54% of human trafficking cases, the recruiter is a stranger, and in 46% of the cases, the recruiters know the victim. Fifty-two percent of human trafficking recruiters are men, 42% are women, and 6% are both men and women.
Human trafficking earns $9 billion to $31.6 billion globally
Human trafficking around the globe is estimated to generate a profit of anywhere from $9 billion to $31.6 billion. Half of these profits are made in industrialized countries.
Some human traffickers recruit handicapped young girls, such as those suffering from Down Syndrome, into the sex industry.
According to the FBI, a large human-trafficking organization in California in 2008 not only physically threatened and beat girls as young as 12 to work as prostitutes, they also regularly threatened them with witchcraft.
Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that is fueled by poverty and gender discrimination.
Human traffickers often work with corrupt government officials to obtain travel documents and seize passports.
Women and girls from racial minorities in the U.S. are disproportionately recruited by sex traffickers in the U.S.
The Sunday Telegraph in the U.K. reports that hundreds of children as young as six are brought to the U.K. as slaves each year.
Japan is considered the largest market for Asian women trafficked for sex.
Airports are often used by human traffickers to hold “slave auctions,” where women and children are sold into prostitution.
Pregnant women are increasingly targeted for human trafficking
Human traffickers are increasingly trafficking pregnant women for their newborns. Babies are sold on the black market, where the profit is divided between the traffickers, doctors, lawyers, border officials, and others. The mother is usually paid less than what is promised her, citing the cost of travel and creating false documents. A mother might receive as little as a few hundred dollars for her baby.
Due to globalization, every continent of the world has been involved in human trafficking, including a country as small as Iceland.
Many times, if a sex slave is arrested, she is imprisoned while her trafficker is able to buy his way out of trouble.
Today, slaves are cheaper than they have ever been in history. The population explosion has created a great supply of workers, and globalization has created people who are vulnerable and easily enslaved.
Human trafficking and smuggling are similar but not interchangeable. Smuggling is transportation based. Trafficking is exploitation based.
Human trafficking has been reported in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and in some U.S. territories.
The FBI estimates that over 500,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from nine to 19, with the average being age 11. Many victims are not just runaways or abandoned, but are from “good” families who are coerced by clever traffickers.
Brazil and Thailand are generally considered to have the worst child sex trafficking records.
Nearly 7,000 Nepali girls as young as nine years old are sold every year into India’s red-light district—or 200,000 in the last decade. Ten thousand children between the ages of six and 14 are in Sri Lanka brothels.
Human trafficking victims face physical risks, such as drug and alcohol addiction, contracting STDs, sterility, miscarriages, forced abortions, vaginal and anal trauma, among others. Psychological effects include developing clinical depression, personality and dissociative disorders, suicidal tendencies, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Africa's AIDS epidemic has increased human trafficking rates for orphaned children
The AIDS epidemic in Africa has left many children orphaned, making them especially vulnerable to human trafficking.
The largest human trafficking case in recent U.S. history occurred in Hawaii in 2010. Global Horizons Manpower, Inc., a labor-recruiting company, bought 400 immigrants in 2004 from Thailand to work on farms in Hawaii. They were lured with false promises of high-paying farm work, but instead their passports were taken away and they were held in forced servitude until they were rescued in 2010.
According to the U.S. State Department, human trafficking is one of the greatest human rights challenges of this century, both in the United States and around the world.

Important Facts about Missing Persons

Where are these millions of missing children and adults going?

Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing in the U.S.
When a child goes missing, the first 3 hours are the most crucial in finding the child safely. Approximately 76.2% of abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction.
Every year, more than 800,000 children are missing in the United States.
In 1980, roughly 150,000 people were reported missing per year. Now the number is 900,000.
Over 2,300 Americans are reported missing every day
In most jurisdictions, missing persons cases receive low priority. Authorities are already working homicides, robberies, rapes, assaults, traffic issues, and crime prevention.
Most of the Indian Ocean tsunami victims in 2004 were identified thought DNA extracted from molars. Since teeth are one of the hardest and most indestructible substances in the human body, they are likely to survive trauma. They are also a good source of DNA if there have been no dental fillings, root canals, etc.
There are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the U.S. at any given time.
Out of the 692,944 people reported missing in 2010, 531,928 were under the age of 18.
According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), 355,243 women were reported missing in 2010 compared to 337,660 men.d
Scholars note that the media focuses more on women, especially white women, who go missing because of society’s apparent obsession with “damsels in distress.” In other words, people are interested in cases in which young, beautiful, often blond, girls have been abducted and are in need of rescue. This is called “the missing white woman syndrome.”
It is estimated that at least 8 million children worldwide go missing each year.
It is estimated that nearly 800,000 children will be reported each year in the U.S; 40,000 children go missing each year in Brazil; 50,500 in Canada; 39,000 in France; 100,000 in Germany; and 45,000 in Mexico. An estimated 230,000 children go missing in the U.K. each year, or one child every 5 minutes.
Child abduction alerts patterned after the U.S. AMBER Alert have been implemented in 18 countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K.
Poor children In many countries, missing children are not tracked
In most of the developing world—including Africa, Asia, and Latin America—no one is counting missing children. Additionally, there are no specific laws on missing children, no established protocol, and no central missing child registries.
In 1998, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) created the Global Missing Children’s Network (GMCN), a multilingual database that features photographs and information about missing children from around the world.
Of the 900,000 people reported missing each year in the U.S., 50,000 are over the age of 18. Half of missing adults are white, 30% are African American, and 20% are Latino.c
Minority children make up 65% of all non-family abductions. African American children make up 42%.
Those with drug and alcohol addiction, psychiatric problems, and the elderly suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s make up the bulk of missing-adult cases.
Half of the 800,000 missing-juvenile cases reported each year are runaways. One quarter of missing-children cases are abductions committed by family members, often as a result of custody disputes. Approximately 100 are kidnappings by strangers. Of these, most of the victims are between 12 and 17, 80% are white, and 90% of the kidnappers are men. In more than half the cases, the victims are sexually assaulted.
In the United States alone, enough children are abducted by family members on an average day to fill a school bus every other hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.d
According to the U.S. Department of State, there are no statistics that track the number of Americans who go missing in a foreign country in a given year. The United Kingdom does, however. In 2008, 481 British disappeared abroad, an increase from 401 the previous year and 336 in 2006.[5] -- Posted August 5, 2013

(Source: Ascension Glossary - Human Trafficking)

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