Child Trafficking

Child Trafficking is the act of enslaving young children between the ages of 12 and 18 in which they are forced, manipulated, or beaten into working as prostitutes. Children working as child prostitutes are either kidnapped, lured away from home or the more shocking side of it, there are a lot of domestic child trafficking, which means that the parents or guardians themselves are the ones selling their children to sex, porn and drugs. CNN- Child Sex Slave in America

Child Sex Slave in America

Facts on Child Trafficking:

• According to some estimates, approximately 80% of trafficking involves sexual exploitation, and 19% involves labor exploitation. All in total across the world, there are about 20 to 30 million slaves in the world today.
• According to the U.S. State Department, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year. More than 70 percent are female and half are children.
• The average age a teen enters the sex trade in the U.S. is 12 to 14-year-old. Many victims are runaway girls who were sexually abused as children.
• California harbors 3 of the FBI’s 13 highest child sex trafficking areas on the nation: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.
• The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives more calls from Texas than any other state in the US. 15 percent of those calls are from the Dallas- Fort Worth area.
• Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year.
• Human trafficking is the third largest international crime industry (behind illegal drugs and arms trafficking). It generates a profit of $32 Billion every year and of that profit, $15.5 Billion is made in industrialized countries.
• The International Labour Organization estimates that women and girls represent the largest share of forced labor victims with 11.4 million trafficked victims (55 percent) compared to 9.5 million (45 percent) men.

Sex Trafficking in the United States

The reason I chose to do this subject is because I find it to be an extremely horrific crime that not many people may know about. I want to dig deep into this subject and study couple of case studies. It is a world-wide crime, I was personally was shocked when learning of child trafficking because I never heard of it before, the more awareness the more prevention that can occur. 

President Obama announced several new initiatives aimed at ending trafficking nationwide, including the first-ever assessment of the problem in this country and a $6 million grant to build solutions."When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family, or girls my daughters' ages run away from home and are lured -- that's slavery," Obama said in an address to the Clinton Global Initiative. "It's barbaric, it's evil, and it has no place in a civilized world."