According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked each year from other countries into the US, and about 80 percent of them are women or children.
Most are trafficked for sex and forced, coerced, or defrauded into performing commercial sex acts, in direct violation of US human trafficking laws. Others are imprisoned in order to provide slave labor, especially on farms.
It’s such a big problem for runaway teens that one in three will be lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
And because human trafficking happens just about everywhere, The Salvation Army hosted a daylong seminar yesterday in Peoria with workshop topics including “The Reality of Trafficking in Central Illinois” and “Agricultural Labor Trafficking.”
A recent exhibition at the Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport dealt with the ubiquity of human rights violations as well. The exhibition came from the Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights and illustrates the need to keep a sense of humor when working to achieve justice.
Criminals, you see, those who abuse women and children, don’t have an arsenal that includes a sense of humor, and, as one of Mr Kennedy’s daughters acknowledged in a recent New York Times story, “Having a sense of humor is a part of being courageous. It’s a source of strength.”
The exhibition, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World, is based on Kerry Kennedy’s book, which she wrote in 2000 with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams. Many of the people she interviewed in her book are or were activists working to eliminate human rights abuses, including trafficking, around the world.
For many of these heroes, their understanding of the abrogation of human rights has been profoundly shaped by their personal experiences: of death threats, imprisonment, and in some cases, bodily harm. However, this is not, by any measure, a compilation of victims. Rather, courage, with its affirmation of possibility and change, is what defines them, singly and together. Each spoke to me with compelling eloquence of the causes to which they have devoted their lives, and for which they are willing to sacrifice them—from freedom of expression to the rule of law, from environmental defense to eradicating bonded labor, from access to capital to the right to due process, from women’s rights to religious liberty. As the Martin Luther Kings of their countries, these leaders hold in common an inspiring record of accomplishment and a profound capacity to ignite change.
I have a hunch that people who conduct seminars about human trafficking aren’t doing much to eradicate or even reduce it within our shores. On the one hand, I’m sorry for being so cynical, but on the other hand, serious problems require serious people, whole people, good people, people with a healthy sense of reality. Because many people on the journey will try to knock you down.
Heroes don’t conduct seminars and workshops; they inspire others to get involved in helpful ways. There’s no need for education on this matter: everybody knows what human trafficking is. The point should be trying to engage people so there’s no demand for it in Central Illinois.
