Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is the unlawful taking of individuals for the purposes of forced servitude. Human trafficking is done for purposes of forced labor in factories, restaurants, sweatshops, and even on the streets as prostitutes. Human trafficking is a heinous crime that is not only against the law but violates a person's innate human rights. It is a crime that is nearly limitless in the scope of its evil nature. Human trafficking for the purposes of forced prostitution is considered one of the worst forms of prostitution. Human trafficking is essentially a form of enslavement and is thus prohibited by the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Any case of alleged human trafficking must be handled by the Federal Bureau of investigation because it is a violation of federal law, a law for which many Americans died for its establishment in the American Civil War. Human trafficking is a crime that the federal government takes very seriously. Reducing prostitution is a means of reducing human trafficking because a significant proportion of the people forcibly taken as slaves are trafficked for the purpose of selling sex.

Human traffickers "recruit" women and men with fraudulent promises of a better life in the United States. They prey on people who want to emigrate illegally to the United States from all over the world because getting documentation from their home countries is difficult or not possible. Human trafficking victims pay a large sum of money to obtain safe passage to the United States. Many of these people are poor and do not have much money so they are forced into servitude to work off their debts.

The traffickers never fulfill their side of the promise and use force to keep their human trafficking victims in involuntary servitude. The main types of labor that human trafficking victims take on are prostitution, domestic labor, restaurant work, and factory work. The greatest proportion of human trafficking victims are forced to work as prostitutes. This gives law enforcement more incentive to crack down on illegal prostitution because not all prostitutes willfully join their profession.

Many human traffickers also force children into sex slavery. Many of the children that law enforcement recovered were domestically kidnapped from many American states. Human trafficking has become both a national and international problem.

Cases of human trafficking have been reported in both rural and urban parts of the country. Urban areas of the country have a greater concentration of human trafficking, most notably the larger metropolitan areas like New York City, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Las Vegas has a greater degree of cases of human trafficking for prostitution due to its reputation for being a center of the illegal sex trade.

A police officer may disrupt a commercial sex transaction in what he or she may think would be a routine prostitution arrest and later find out some disturbing background information on a prostitute. Reducing prostitution on the streets of America's largest cities will reduce the market for forced sex slavery. The connection between illegal prostitution and human trafficking is indisputable and is a priority of law enforcement.

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