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There are more slaves now than ever before according to the US Department of State, the United Nations, the International Labor Organization. Human trafficking is worse now than the Pharos of Egypt, the Roman Empire, or the transatlantic slave trade of the colonial era. Vatican Quote: “It's worse than the slavery of those who were taken from Africa and brought to other countries.”

Child Trafficking Defined Here

Widespread Child Trafficking occurs wherever there are ONE of three things happening: Extreme Poverty, Political Chaos, or War.

Child Trafficking works through Recruitment, Transportation, Exploitation
Children leave their home for a FEE, or to FLEE or to be FREE. Wherever it takes place the procedure is similar: A young girl or boy is brought from one place to another by someone who enslaves them. Years of exploitation and abuse follow. In the US, the young people are usually runaways. They are recruited in malls, bus stations, shelters and online.

Children are used for: Sexual Exploitation (prostitution, sex tourism, pornography, etc.) forced labor (cocoa, coffee, diamonds, rugs, silk, etc.), illegal activities (begging, selling drugs), child soldiers, forced marriage, adoption (sales), body parts.

Child Trafficking is the fastest growing crime in the world.
UNICEF values the global market of child trafficking at over $12 billion a year with over 1.2 million child victims.

Child Trafficking is the third largest crime in the world, for Transnational Crime, just after drugs and guns.

Domestically, it occurs in every community in America. This is Slavery in the Suburbs. The FBI has determined that the average age for females entering prostitution in the US is 13.

Why are children becoming the most profitable product for criminals?
A drug dealer can sell a little bag of drugs on the street just once.
A weapons dealer can sell a little hand gun on the street just once.
A trafficker can sell a little kid on the street 10, 15, 20 a day; day after day after day.

No one is going to let go of that kind of profit, unless someone takes it from them.

This is terrorism against children.

Child trafficking is characterized by three stages:

1. Recruitment of trafficking victims take place primarily in developing countries like Asia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Africa. Countries of origin are generally marked by economic and political instability.
2. Transportation typically involves a complex route of travel and paid handlers. Depending on the length of transit and the political situation at the point of destination, smugglers pay widely varying prices for transport and bribes.
3. Exploitation. In the country of destination, trafficked persons are usually exploited by their recruiters for financial profit, and are sold or leased to others. Such persons usually hold their victims under conditions of physical captivity, and use force, threats, debt bondage, drugs, and coercion to subject them to different forms of exploitation. As with any illegal activity, information and data that convey the true scale of the problem is difficult to measure accurately. Typically, these children are taken – either through force or deception – and trafficked to distant places, sometimes within their own country, sometimes to foreign lands. There, they often join many other children already trapped in the commercial sex industry.

Of course, once they are taken their survival is unlikely. In fact, everything is taken away: their development, their rights to an education, to health, and to grow up within a protected and safe environment free from abuse and exploitation.

Traffickers are known to recruit their victims using a variety of methods. While abduction and kidnapping is often their tool, trafficking victims are very often trapped in more subversive ways. Typically, the traffickers promise their victims, usually girls and young women, that they will have respectable work as perhaps waitresses or domestic servants in another place or country. Traffickers may also persuade parents that their children will have a better life elsewhere: a secure job and the chance of a better education and future. In fact, they are often selling them to filthy brothels. Some of these parents or girls may even know, or suspect, that they will be sex workers, but desperate poverty and lack of both education and awareness can lead to their willingness to accept any offer – no matter the risk to the children.

What they do not know, however, is the extent of the abuse and degradation they will suffer, and the likelihood that they will be trapped in debt bondage. Either way, they go with these strangers only to discover upon their arrival in some strange land that they are victims of an evil deception. Simply put, they become slaves.

There is a difference between slavery and enslavement. In the modern world, few governments have laws providing for legal human ownership. This is the old model of slavery. So, the criminal factor takes over. The dynamics for slavery still exist, that is, the demand for enslaved human beings as a commodity, but the definitions and logistics for carrying it out have changed. Pro Slavery laws (mostly abolished throughout the world) have been replaced by Force, Fraud, and Coercion. This is enslavement.

Further, children forced to work in the sex industry are at considerable risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. For girls, there is the added risk of very early pregnancy and permanent damage to their reproductive health. Some trafficked children are also subdued and controlled with drugs to which they become easily addicted. They are then effectively trapped within the cycle of exploitation, because continuing with the work is seen as the only way to obtain their supplies.

This problem is not small or simple. It is a looming threat to children all over the world on several levels. That is why Ahava Kids works with the brave people who intervene directly in this vile trade.