Jan. 11 marks the ninth annual National Human Trafficking Awareness Day and the fifth annual National Slavery And Human Trafficking Prevention month. More than 20 million people are affected by trafficking each year, with the studies from the International Labour Organization report showing that three out of every 1,000 people are "trapped in jobs into which they were coerced or deceived."
Congress places human trafficking into two broad categories: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. The nature of human trafficking means that it is difficult to collect accurate statistics on how many people are affected, but an organization formed by medical practitioners in conjunction with the Polaris Project, one of the most well-known non-governmental anti-trafficking organizations, claims that around 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year. Globally, the U.S. Department of State estimates that there are 20 million people enslaved around the world but that only a tiny fraction of them are ever identified as victims of human trafficking.
Crimes of human trafficking are difficult to research, as incidents go under reported and are difficult to identify. The National Trafficking Resource Center dispels many common misconceptions about sex and labor trafficking, including the fact that many visible and legal businesses, such as restaurants, hotels and manufacturing plants, may be exploiting the labor of human trafficking victims.
The majority of trafficking cases that are reported are for sex work, but many activists criticize the methods used as part of anti-trafficking schemes for being counter-productive and actually harmful to victims, according to a report by the Sex Workers Project. A senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, Nisha Varia, stated in a blog post that "sadly, victims of forced labor are too often treated like criminals instead of people who are entitled to assistance." Denise Brennan, author of the book "Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States," identified immigration law as another barrier for trafficking victims, telling Rolling Stone that "our current immigration regime - deportation regime - makes it impossible to fight trafficking."
The Presidential Proclamation for National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month promises to continue to fight trafficking domestically and around the world and to "continue promoting development and economic growth across the globe to address the underlying conditions that enable human trafficking in the first place."
The month culminates on the National Freedom Day, which is celebrated on Feb. 1.
