“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

-Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

It is a certainty in itself that our world is run by numbers. From time, to statistics, to sizes, our society lives its code through the medium of numbers. Numbers are our facts. They can be said to most often epitomize the people we surround ourselves with. To demographics and data plots, one can go as far to say that we are all, in some way, walking numbers.

At what point do we start recognizing each other as more than the numbers we represent, but as the stories that we carry?

Yes, numbers are important. Numbers display necessary information to the world about our brothers and sisters of and around this planet, but as we forget the stories that the data holds, we become increasingly numb to the knowledge that we take in.

Some facts that have been highly publicized in both national and international lights are the deep hurts and offences of human trafficking. These words, “human trafficking” have been attached to countless strings of news reports, government documents and documentary films as the “pandemic” spreads at alarming rates.

It’s “$32 billion-a-year global industry” and “26% are children” are both numbers that cannot be easily overlooked. As the number of the “20 million” victims enslaved today grows only by the hour, the attention of bystanders must be demanded.

As a society, we cannot afford to not be affected by these numbers any longer. We cannot let these facts be glazed over by our widened eyes because these numbers are not simply numbers. They are not figures that stand alone on a PowerPoint presentation or on a billboard meant for us to mindlessly pass by. But indeed, these “numbers” stand; these numbers have scars. They have scars that speak, they tell of dark nights and alleyways but also of times at mid-day in the pursuit of something as simple as water for a young girl and her family. These women, and yes men, can be trafficked at any time, any place, under any circumstances. There is no criteria, no “type.”

But heartbreakingly enough, the number of victims are growing.