The Global Impact of Modern Slavery or Human Trafficking
When she was eighteen, Chong Kim, a normal girl from Oklahoma, was abducted by the man whom she had been dating. He and other traffickers forced her and a large number of other young women to live in storage units where they were then transported across the United States as part of a prostitution ring. Several years later, she finally managed to escape through a vent in a Las Vegas casino (The Survivor Archives). Unfortunately, Kim’s story is not a rare occurrence. Modern slavery, more frequently referred to under the broader term “human trafficking,” has shown to be an incredibly serious global issue.
Somewhat surprisingly, people often don’t realize just how widespread both human trafficking
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By definition, human trafficking is “the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of persons by the threat or use of kidnapping, force, fraud, deception or coercion, or by the giving or receiving of unlawful payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, and for the purpose of sexual exploitation or forced labor” ("Background Information."). This essentially means that anyone in any location can be a victim of human trafficking if the three main specifics- the act of trafficking, the means of trafficking, and the purpose of trafficking- stated apply to the given situation (UNODC). The pie charts below break down the statistics for the United States and essentially states who victims commonly are and what they are forced …show more content…
Russia is another center for traffickers. Individual cities within countries usually vary as well (see the illustration below). For example, in the United States, the states containing the greatest concentrations of trafficked persons are New York, California, and Florida. Washington, D.C., also has a large concentration of trafficked persons as well (“Background