This week Ro is teaching us about Human Trafficking. It’s kind of a crazy subject, resulting in excessive quantities of notes. How do we fight something as huge, yet as secret as Human Trafficking? We start by raising awareness, because evil and injustice thrives in darkness and deception. So here’s some of what we’ve been learning so far…
Ever hear those stories of teens running away and just disappearing? Or see “missing kid” posters at the grocery store? Where do those kids end up? I’d say there’s a good chance they’ve become victims of Human Trafficking.
An estimated 27,000,000 people are trafficked worldwide.
The majority are women trafficked for the purpose of sex slavery (prostitution, pornography). Traffickers earn back in 1 week the money they paid to buy a girl, by selling the girl 10-40 times a night, which is what happens in the brothels in Mumbai, India.
People are trafficked into forced labor or forced begging - sometimes children are intentionally disfigured like in the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”. Yes it really happens.
Children are forced to be soldiers – as seen in the movie “Blood Diamond”
The craziest one is organ theft. The wealthy get what they want at the expense of the poor. Men in India have their kidneys stolen! In China babies are killed purposely and their organs are used for Western transplants. Sort of along those lines, I just watched the movie “My Sister’s Keeper” which is kind of about forced organ donation, it’s a good movie, but rather sad.
Though there are a lot of movies like “Trade” and “Taken”, Ro explained that Human Trafficking is more like a TV Series – it goes on and on with twists in the plot and exceptions to the rule. The characters are:
- Victim = could be anybody, regardless of age, sex, race, ethnicity
- Traffickers who could be a family member, drug dealer, boyfriend, brothel owner, criminal, or pimp.
- The Consumer - sex addicts, porn, brothel owners, strip clubs, hotel, shoppers, and their demand: I want…to fulfill sexual fantasies, buy things cheaply, cheap labor, be rich, feel powerful.
Whether we know it or not, we’re all involved in the bigger plot of trafficking and slavery, because we buy food and clothing and prefer it to be cheap, but we don’t know where it’s coming from or how it’s made – slave labor? 70% of USA’s chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast via child slave labor.
Here in Costa Rica, men come for “sex tourism” There’s a big lie among these “Consumers” that the women and girls like their “job” and enjoy giving men what they want, because it makes the girls feel good about themselves to be with a man, or whatever. Seriously? What the heck is wrong with them? It makes me so angry.
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