Imagine yourself leaving for a trip that you have been looking forward to for months now. You enjoy the seemingly endless flight and finally arrive at your destination. After settling into your hotel room, you decide to go and explore the area even though it was already late. You walk a few miles through areas you are unfamiliar with and at this point, you are kidnapped. You wake up to find yourself lying in a small, confined room on a filthy bed, shielded only by your now ragged clothing. Outside of the room, you can hear voices of many different men who are shouting and arguing back and forth with each other. As you look to your left, you see a young girl huddled in the corner, crying, and you both leap to your feet as you hear the door strike open only to see a man standing in the doorway beginning to shout orders at the both of you. You are then forced to undress and perform activities against your will and to them, you are an item, not a human being. You have just experienced the fear of being a victim of human trafficking.

To the majority of people, slavery seems as if it is something that existed decades before our time, but the truth is that is has taken an unpleasant turn into something that takes away a child’s innocence and their adolescence. The heartbreaking truth is that the majority of victims that are involved in human trafficking engage in some type of sexual or slavery act. According to the founders of the Trafficking Hope foundation, Lee and Laura Dominigue, the average age that a child enters into human trafficking is between 11 and 14 years old but the youngest confirmed age of a sex trafficking victim was six years old . Kamala Harris, Attorney General of California, states that Human Trafficking is a $32 billion business worldwide and is known as the “second most profitable enterprise.” Human Trafficking is defined as a form of slavery that is used to force or manipulate a human being into working hours on end in terrible conditions in which they are not allowed to leave and cannot escape from the person they are being held by .

When most people hear of human trafficking they picture it as something that happens outside of the United States but what they don’t realize is that in the United States alone, human trafficking profits around 9.5 billion dollars every year and roughly 300,000 children are at risk of being a victim of human trafficking in the United States . Worldwide, there is about 20 million victims of human trafficking and about 2.5 million of those victims are from or are trafficked into the United States. Danielle Douglas, a freshman at Northeastern University, was 17 years old when she was forced into two years of sex slavery. She was required to work eighteen hours a day and wasn’t able to escape because she feared the thought of being killed. If she were to do something her kidnapper didn’t like, she would be slapped across the face or thrown across the room and sometimes she would be strangled. After she was rescued from sex trafficking, it took Danielle five years to fully begin to act like herself again .

A pimp that works in the human trafficking business will make 150,000-200,000 dollars per child each year and has up to four to six girls that are each given to different men twenty to forty-eight times every day. As stated by the Covering House, the department of justice determined the top 20 human trafficking places in the country which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte, Miami, Las Vegas, New York, Long Island, New Orleans, Houston, El Paso, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Phoenix, Richmond, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Seattle, and Tampa . Sex trafficking is real whether it happens close to your home or not and it is growing in today's society. We need to take a stand to help stop sex trafficking.