It is estimated that every year in the US at least 200,000 underage girls and boys are sucked into sex trafficking. Some of these children are runaways who are picked up by traffickers in bus stations, some are high school students enticed by promises of a weekend in a big city or at the beach, others are born into at risk families and and are sold by family members. However it happens these children are then trapped into sex slavery and made to "service" up to 20 men per night for their traffickers. I can think of almost nothing more unjust than ripping a child from her/his childhood and subjecting them to that kind of abuse.
Until recently anti slavery/trafficking organizations had no idea that so many children in the US were being trafficked. It was thought that sex trafficking was mainly confined to Asia, India, Eastern Europe and parts of Africa and that most trafficking in the US stemmed from smuggling women from these regions into the US. But, as statistics have been gathered and groups like Shared Hope have been hired by the US Department of Justice to go into major cities and research how many women/girls are trapped in trafficking it has become apparent that the problem is much larger than anyone appreciated and that many children born in the US are being trapped and enticed into trafficking.
This fall Stop Child Trafficking Now is holding walks all over the nation to raise funds and increase awareness of child trafficking. The idea behind this group is to use Special Forces Operatives to go in and build cases against the demand side of trafficking because, the truth is, if there were no men willing to buy children for sex there would be no child trafficking! Here's to hoping and praying that it becomes very dangerous for any man in the US to buy and abuse a child or trap any woman in trafficking.
Please consider walking in a walk or supporting someone you know who does.
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