Child Trafficking
Picture by Shravan Acharya (unsplash)
Child Trafficking
"What most people think they know about child trafficking generally involves stories – young girls and boys being kidnapped by strangers, forced into windowless vans, then driven to another city or state where they are kept drugged and chained in a brothel.
While situations like these do exist, they are more of an exception than the rule - a study analysing press releases and online media reports from over a nine year period found that fewer than 10 percent of cases involved kidnapping.
The danger of these misconceptions is that while we are on high alert for windowless vans and teaching our children about stranger danger, we may well be missing out on what is really going on.
Traffickers tend to prey on people who are economically or socially vulnerable such as youth who are living in poverty, or on the streets, or experience physical or sexual abuse, or addiction. They pose as a friend, offering to meals, gifts, or just a sympathetic ear. In some cases, traffickers may use another young person to befriend and recruit their victims. This recruitment can happen in public places as well as online, through social media sites, or through false advertisements or promises about job opportunities that might appeal to young people.
Although runaway and homeless youth are particularly vulnerable, there are also several examples of victims who were groomed and recruited while living at home and even attending school.
The reality is, many of us would be surprised by what we could be manipulated into doing, with the right combination of external factors in play. Traffickers are experts at finding those moments when people are vulnerable, of working the angles, of manipulating reality and leveraging fears. The process is called grooming."
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Child Trafficking
Proposition for a Children Trafficking awareness campaign