Transitioning Times

January is the National Human Trafficking Awareness Month and Sunday, January 11, is the National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. What is human trafficking? It is the modern day slave trade, which is worse than it ever has been in history. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (n.d.), the Trafficking Victims Protections Act, defines human trafficking and sex trafficking in the following ways: “Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age, (22 USC § 7102). “Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bon...

Truckers Against Trafficking (28:11) from iEmpathize on Vimeo . Human trafficking is the sale or commodification of a person and/or their labor for the benefit of another through methods of force, coercion, fraud, or if the victim is a minor.  Here's a further explanation from The Polaris Project . As defined under U.S. federal law, victims of human trafficking include children involved in the sex trade, adults age 18 or over who are coerced or deceived into commercial sex acts, and anyone forced into different forms of "labor or services," such as domestic workers held in a home, or farm-workers forced to labor against their will. The factors that each of these situations have in common are elements of force, fraud, or coercion that are used to control people.  Then, that control is tied to inducing someone into commercial sex acts, or labor or services.  Many of the outreach and prevention efforts are centered around children, but they are not the only victims...