Human Trafficking Essay

644 Words2 Pages

Rory Carroll
Global, Period 4

Human Trafficking is a world-wide undetected problem. Over the past 10 years, 2.4 million people across the globe have become victims of human trafficking, and 80 percent of them, woman/children, are being exploited as sexual slaves. Majority of victims trafficked into this worldwide industry are Eastern European citizens. Eastern European citizens from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary are the most common victims of human trafficking in Europe. Human Trafficking is known as the “slavery of modern age.” Human rights are being violated everyday in this organized crime. The number of humans trafficked has been on the rise over the last few years, and there are possibly hundreds of thousands cases unreported (The EU’s dirty secret.) The secrecy and invisibility of the trafficking trade highly contributes to the growth and success of this organized-crime business. While the trafficking of woman and children in Europe may not immediately affect American lives, the illegal kidnapping, enslaving, and exploiting of people is a horrific human rights violation that all members of the American democracy should be concerned with.

Human Trafficking has been an ongoing issue for centuries all over the globe. In more recent times, there has been a dramatic increase shown in reports of the number of people being trafficked in eastern Europe due to various factors. One of the main contributing factors to the increase of human trafficking in eastern Europe is known to be the collapse of the soviet union, 1991, in Europe. “The collapse of the soviet union ended seventy years of centralized social, political, and economic controls that guaranteed employment and social security for all” (Kate Transchel). These controls ...

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... The Balkan war fought from 1991 to 1999 on the land of former Yugoslav, led many foreign soldiers to this territory. These men were away from their wives, and secluded with only men for 9 years straight. The increase in brothels by the soldiers in this region was a very big cause for thousands of women and children to be exploited in commercial sex. When the war in former Yugoslav was over, many soldiers extended their military base time and remained in this region for sex. Once the military bases were gone, the issue of human trafficking in the Balkans did not disappear, but remained. “The report of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), for example, shows that several years after the end of the war in former Yugoslavia, trafficking in the Balkans is still a significant problem affecting growing numbers of women and children” (Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic).

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