Human Trafficking

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but with the busyness of the last quarter and the downtime afforded me by this spring break, I’m only getting around to it now. I’m only offering a snapshot, providing some links, hoping you’ll go look up some stuff for yourself and get involved in the fight against the modern day slave trade.

I came across this staggering truth only in recent years, thanks to Kevin Bales’ Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy and David Batstone’s Not for Sale. As Bales writes, slavery is still alive and well, two centuries after the Slave Trade Act was passed in Great Britain and nearly 150 years after the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in the United States. “Around the world we still face the terrible frozen face of ignorance. The awareness that there are twenty-seven million slaves in the world has not yet fully penetrated the public mind, but the sparks and fires of committed people are beginning to melt that icy apathy” (xii).

Twenty-seven million people are trafficked. Twenty-seven million.

Think about it. It's a justice issue. It's a moral issue. It shouldn't be happening.

Organizations and websites you can check out (nicked from one of the appendices of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage:

Amnesty International
Anti-Slavery International (UK)
Freedom House
HumanTrafficking.org
Human Rights First
Human Rights Watch
International Labour Organization
UNICEF
United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
US Department of Justice
US Department of Health & Human Services: Campaign to Rescue & Restore Victims of Human Trafficking
US Department of State: Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
World Health Organization

See also:

The Sold Project
Oasis’s Stop the Traffik
Free the Slaves
Call+Response