Since 2007, we have worked closely with local partners to help tens of thousands of callers connect with the help and services they need. As a result of the calls, emails, and online tip reports fielded by the hotline over the course of our first five years of operation, the NHTRC maintains one of the most extensive data sets on the issue of human trafficking in the United States.
From December 7, 2007, through December 31, 2012, the NHTRC answered 65,557 calls, 1,735 online tip forms, and 5,251 emails — totaling more than 72,000 interactions. This report is based on the information learned from these interactions during the first five years of the hotline’s operation by Polaris.
Key facts:
The NHTRC experienced a 259% increase in calls between 2008 and 2012.
In five years, we received reports of 9,298 unique cases of human trafficking.
The three most common forms of sex trafficking reported to the hotline involved pimp-controlled prostitution, commercial-front brothels, and escort services. Labor trafficking was most frequently reported in domestic work, restaurants, peddling rings, and sales crews.
41% of sex trafficking cases and 20% of labor trafficking cases referenced U.S. citizens as victims.
Women were referenced as victims in 85% of sex trafficking cases, and men in 40% of labor trafficking cases.
-I downloaded the flyer so that I can start pinning it in places that I frequent. I am also working on starting a video podcast called Critical Mass and will be speaking on this topic. As long as our children can come home every night to a warm bed, we should be fighting for these children, (and adults ), as well. Thank you!
Many of you have seen my posts on human trafficking and are now realizing that this cause is near and dear to my heart. I have three healthy children that I love very much who go to sleep in a comfortable bed every night while others do not. These are the children forced to suffer and grow up in bondage to completely evil people who do not value human life. These are many super rich and rich people who travel far and wide to have sex with under age boys and girls and skirt the limit of the law. Many of these children are forced into sex, cleaning houses, slaving over stoves cooking for their vile masters and otherwise laboring to make money for subhuman assholes not worthy of loathing!
View my articles and know the signs.Don’t be the one who walks past as a girl is being raped and justify your inaction. Get involved if you see any suspicious activity and protect these children as if they were your own! We are adults and as adults we are tasked with protecting children no matter whose they are! I would definitely put my life on the line if I could save a child because I am an adult! That is my job! If I see a child uncomfortable with a person, then I will ask that child if the adult is related, because the child will usually break because it is scared! If I find that the child does not know this person, then the kidnapper’s life is definitely at risk, because if he does not run, then I will beat the holy living fuckshit out of him for stealing a child. Nuff fucking said!
Be diligent! People are losing their lives because of these subhuman fucktools. They need to be stopped and these kids need to know that someone somewhere cares for them.
Twenty countries received the worst possible ranking on the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report released Wednesday by the U.S. State Department, meaning the department doesn’t think their governments are in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to get in compliance.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during an event releasing the annual Trafficking in Persons Report at the State Department on Wednesday, June 19, 2013.
China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Central African Republic, Libya, Uzbekistan, Syria and Sudan are among the nations given the lowest Tier 3 ranking, the report said. Trafficking victims are forced to work as sex slaves, or lured to countries with the promise of legitimate jobs only to be forced into situations where they are forced to work long hours in factories, processing plants, on farms or fishing vessels for low or no pay and made to live in poor conditions where they are subject to beatings and rapes if they speak out against their conditions or try to escape. In some cases, children are forced to become soldiers.
Countries listed as Tier 3 are subject to certain sanctions, including the withdrawing or withholding of nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related aid.
China responded to the report on Thursday, with a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry saying the U.S. needs to take an “objective and impartial view of China’s efforts and stop making unilateral and arbitrary judgments.”
In a daily press briefing on Thursday, China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the U.S. “should take an objective and impartial view of China’s efforts and stop making unilateral and arbitrary judgments.”
“The Chinese government attaches great importance to fighting all trafficking crimes and protecting the rights of victims. We have been constantly improving our domestic legislation, strengthening our law enforcement and judicial measures and cooperating with all countries, including our neighbor countries,” spokeswoman Chunying Hua said.
Countries listed on the Tier 2 Watch List are those that don’t fully comply with the Act’s minimum standards but are working to come into compliance but still retain significant numbers of trafficking victims or other significant issues. Watch list countries include Chad, Cambodia, Rwanda, Lebanon, Albania, Honduras, Bahrain, Belarus and Thailand, which is on the watch list for the fourth consecutive year.
Tier 2 countries are those that don’t meet full compliance under the act but are taking important steps to become compliant. Japan, Jamaica, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Iraq, Hong Kong, Romania, Singapore, Nigeria, Bahamas, Turkey and Egypt are among the countries receiving this designation.
“Ending modern slavery must remain a foreign policy priority. Fighting this crime wherever it exists is in our national interest,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in the report’s introduction. “Human trafficking undermines the rule of law and creates instability. It tears apart families and communities. It damages the environment and corrupts the global supply chains and labor markets that keep the world’s economies thriving.”
Thailand recently has been in the news following the release of reports detailing alleged human rights and trafficking abuses in its seafood processing and fisheries industries. The Environmental Justice Foundation, which released the report on Thailand’s fisheries industry, said the report shows urgent action is needed from the Thai government and from the seafood supply chain to eliminate these abuses.
“The fish caught by these vessels, crewed by trafficked workers, is used to supply fish to the shrimp industry and provide for fish markets in Europe and the United States,” Steve Trent, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement. “Thailand needs to address this issue head on, by rooting out corruption, prosecuting offending boat owners and companies, and ensuring a rigorous inspection regime. Meanwhile seafood businesses need to urgently investigate their supply chains to ensure that no products linked to human trafficking are present.”
China, Russia, and Uzbekistan have been named among the worst offenders when it comes to human trafficking, according to a State Department report released Wednesday, joining Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe on the bottom “tier” of the U.S. human trafficking rank.
Their lower designation means the U.S. may sanction those countries with measures like cancelling non-humanitarian and military assistance, ending exchange visits for government officials, and voting against any IMF or World Bank loans.
China, Russia, and Uzbekistan had previously been on the “Tier 2 Watch List,” a middling designation for countries that show little progress in making strides in preventing forced labor. Because they had been on the “Watch List” for four years, the State Department was obligated to either promote or downgrade them.
In China, the one-child policy and a cultural preference for male children perpetuates the trafficking of brides and prostitutes.
“During the year, Chinese sex trafficking victims were reported on all of the inhabited continents,” the report found. “Traffickers recruited girls and young women, often from rural areas of China, using a combination of fraudulent job offers, imposition of large travel fees, and threats of physical or financial harm, to obtain and maintain their service in prostitution.”
However, the State Department also singled out the country’s epidemic of forced labor, in which both internal and external migrants are conscripted to work in coal mines or factories without pay, as well as its continued use of re-education hard labor camps for political dissidents.
In Russia, there are estimates that 50,000 children are involved in involuntary prostitution, said David Abramowitz, vice president for policy at Humanity United, an advocacy group. What’s more, about one million people there are thought to be exposed to exploitive labor conditions, including extremely poor living conditions, the withholding for documents, and nonpayment for services.
“In 2012, the government deported hundreds of labor trafficking victims found in squalid conditions in a Moscow garment factory and levied criminal charges against other trafficking victims allegedly held in servitude for a decade,” the report found.
Human Rights Watch has pointed out that some of Russia’s labor abuses have occurred during the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, with some workers enduring “12-hour shifts with one day off per month, having their passports confiscated, being denied employment contracts, and facing unsanitary and overcrowded employer-provided accommodations, with up to 200 migrant workers living in a one single-family home.”
Still, prosecutions for human trafficking there remain low compared to the scope of the problem, and the government has still not established any concrete system for identifying or helping trafficking victims, the State Department found.
In Uzbekistan, the annual cotton harvest has been the biggest human-trafficking culprit. The country is the world’s sixth largest cotton producer, and each year local officials force thousands of children to pick cotton in the fields in order to meet quotas cheaply. (Abramowitz points out that this year, the country actually replaced some of the child workers with teenagers and city workers, but it’s forced labor nonetheless.)
Abramowitz said the three countries could improve their “tier” ranking if they stepped up their training of law enforcement officials to identify and assist trafficking victims, cracked down on forced labor in factories, and became more transparent about their data on sex slavery and other human rights abuses.
Russia and China reacted angrily to the report, saying the rankings were based on diplomatic closeness with Washington rather than realities on the ground.
“The very idea of raising this issue causes indignation,” Russian foreign ministry human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov said in a statement.
Beijing’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, “We believe that the U.S. side should take an objective and impartial view of China’s efforts and stop making unilateral or arbitrary judgements of China.”
In a forward to the report, Secretary of State John Kerry wrote that fighting human trafficking would remain a foreign-policy priority. “Fighting this crime wherever it exists is in our national interest,” he wrote.
UN General Assembly President calls for redoubled efforts to end human trafficking The President of the 66th United Nations General Assembly His Excellency Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser today called on Member States, civil society, the private sector and the media to step up efforts to bring an end to human trafficking, calling it “an appalling form of human rights abuse”.
U.N.: 2.4 Million Human Trafficking Victims The UN crime-fighting office announced that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.
Estonia Makes Human Trafficking Illegal Estonia’s Parliament has passed legislation banning human trafficking, making the Baltic nation the last EU country to enact such laws.
Cecilia Flores-Oebanda is the Founder and Director of the Visayan Forum Foundation (VFI) in the Philippines. She was a recipient of the Anti-Slavery Award in 2005. VFI is one of the most well-known nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines, focusing on the specific needs of human trafficking victims.
[…] This is from Compassion providing some awful statistics about human trafficking. http://blog.compassion.com/human-trafficking-awareness-day-what-is-a-childs-life-worth/ […]
gottabigheart
Jan 15, 2013
at 12:20 pm
wow, I never knew it was that bad in some places, mean I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know where
I never knew the numbers were so staggering. How sad that the lives of the children have been taken away in such a base manner. Thank you for sharing this sobering and extremely sad information.
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hitchens67 Atheism WOW!! Logic and reason campaign 
[…] is Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Here’s a repost of a piece I wrote for Anti-Slavery Day last year – the issues remain […]
very nice article. i have share this in blog. and bookmarked this blog for future information. thank youl.
[…] graphic was taken from Compassion International. On the sidebar you’ll notice another agency that I’ll be blogging for from time to […]
[…] http://blog.compassion.com/human-trafficking-awareness-day-what-is-a-childs-life-worth/ […]
Wow…..Thank you Compassion for stepping up to save those precious kids!
Great infographic! Great reassurance for new/existing donors/child sponsors in knowing your commitment to combating Modern Day Slavery.
Would love to read more. Keep up the amazing work in the Kingdom.
thank you for informing us about such a desperate issue in this world.
I applaud Compassion for bringing child trafficking to everyone’s attention. The numbers are extremely shocking!
A child’s life is PRICELESS
that’s why God paid an INFINITE PRICE for HIS children’s LIVES
[…] This is from Compassion providing some awful statistics about human trafficking. http://blog.compassion.com/human-trafficking-awareness-day-what-is-a-childs-life-worth/ […]
wow, I never knew it was that bad in some places, mean I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know where
I never knew the numbers were so staggering. How sad that the lives of the children have been taken away in such a base manner. Thank you for sharing this sobering and extremely sad information.