January 11th Marks National Human Trafficking Awareness Day
One hundred forty six years ago, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a presidential order helping to end slavery in America and to adhere to the understanding advanced in the Declaration of Independence that we are all endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War, America believed that it could forever wash its hands of this tragic and reprehensible violation of basic human rights. Unfortunately, the modern scourge that is human trafficking belies this belief.
Each year, an estimated 14,500 – 17,500 men, women and children are trafficked into the United States, and held as captives in the underground worlds of sex slavery and forced labor. Internationally, estimates suggest that at any given moment, there are 12.3 million people on the planet in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude; other estimates range from 4 million to 27 million.
For the first time in our nation’s history, America will observe January 11 th as National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, as a means of recognizing the millions of victims of exploitation across the planet. Last year, the United States Congress passed a resolution creating the day of observance, and law enforcement, non-governmental organizations, and human services agencies will be using the day to increase awareness for those who have been demoralized and dehumanized by human traffickers.
This past October, the nonprofit research organization RAND Corporation released a study examining the nature and breadth of trafficking in two Ohio cities, Columbus and Toledo, during the years of 2003 to 2006. Its findings were alarming, but demonstrative of the importance of continuing to raise awareness of the public, and of those agencies and officials tasked with busting trafficking operations and assisting its victims.
RAND reported that both Columbus and Toledo have identified instances of trafficking within their cities; while Toledo’s traffickers all peddled in child prostitution, Columbus’s involved forced labor of non-citizens. Both, however, shared the defining characteristic of this despicable crime against humanity – the use of force, fraud and coercion to induce someone into a commercial sex act or forced labor.
RAND also assessed the infrastructures and understanding in place within the two cities to combat trafficking and assist its victims. RAND found during its three year investigation that law enforcement and social service agencies in Columbus were deficient in their understanding of the characteristics of trafficking, and suggested such a lack of awareness could increase the chance that human trafficking victims could be treated as criminals. Such a misidentification is entirely understandable: in life or death fear of their captors, victims of sex trafficking rarely approach law enforcement; they are unlikely to identify their traffickers when questioned by authorities; and they typically speak limited English. Accordingly, sex trafficking victims are often mistakenly presumed to be prostitutes to be treated as criminals, rather than as victims ensnared in a sex slavery operation and deserving of our compassion and assistance.
It should be noted while there may have been a significant lack of awareness of trafficking in central Ohio at the time of the study, perhaps the RAND report was premature. Last July, Columbus became the twenty-first city in America to initiate a Rescue and Restore program -- a broad collaboration of law enforcement, human services and nonprofit agencies from all levels of government to raise the consciousness of trafficking. Under Rescue and Restore, member organizations and agencies receive training to help them recognize the signs of human trafficking and learn how to take action to assist victims.
The Rescue and Restore Campaign interfaces seamlessly with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act passed by Congress in 2005. The bill included provisions I authored to combat domestic trafficking, including grants establishing and expanding assistance for victims of sex trafficking; help for state and local law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute sex trafficking cases; and strategies for combating unlawful commercial sex activities by targeting demand for trafficked victims. As a result of the new law, more than $28 million was appropriated for these efforts in FY 2006, providing new hope for the tens of thousands of women and children in the U.S. who are coerced into this underworld of violence and degradation.
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day is an important and symbolic acknowledgement of the plight of the men, women and children languishing in slavery both in the U.S. and around the world. What is more encouraging, however, is that we are now more effectively utilizing our nation’s resources and expertise to end this misery once and for all, and restore the fundamental human rights to those who were mercilessly robbed of them.
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