Sex Trafficking

October 28th marks 20 years since the first Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was signed into law establishing the crime of human trafficking in the United States and forming the baseline for where the movement head.

Survivor Cheri Crider describes her story of resilience. She emphasizes that people need to better understand the complexities of how trafficking works and how certain systems exacerbate the crime.

Not all the missing children recovered in recent high profile U.S. Marshals operations were victims of human trafficking. But what we know about those operations reconfirms what we know about how sex trafficking happens in the vast majority of situations.

When most people think about child sex trafficking they think of stories involving kidnapping, windowless vans, and chains. However, focusing on these rarer examples may cause us to miss out on the realities of how trafficking typically happens.

The pandemic is greatly impacting Latinos and Black people in the United States as the result of systemic inequities in our society. Those inequities are the same ones that create the vulnerabilities that traffickers often take advantage of.

The Wayfair theory, like other viral stories, can potentially result in overwhelming services meant for victims, as well as increasing online harassment and privacy intrusions of people mistakenly believed to be victims. These theories also detract from the knowledge we do have about how sex trafficking actually works, and how we can prevent it.

Over the past several days the National Human Trafficking Hotline has received hundreds of reports that reference viral posts claiming Wayfair has been involved in sex trafficking children.

The 2020 Trafficking in Persons is primarily a tool of diplomacy, used to help engage foreign governments in efforts to make positive changes that protect vulnerable people and end exploitation. But it is also a good jumping off point for the United States to do some much needed self-examination. 

In the case of a landlord soliciting sex in exchange for rent, the implied threat is clear: provide sex or you and your family will be homeless. This is sex trafficking.

Polaris detalla las distintas industrias que en los Estados Unidos ofrecen un terreno fértil para la trata de personas y explotación de latinoamericanos y caribeños.

In a new report, Polaris describes the industries that prey on communities from Latin America and the Caribbean for human trafficking and exploitation in the United States.

This report analyzes data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline and exposes the types of trafficking in which populations from Latin American and the Caribbean are victimized in the United States.