Sex Trafficking Issue

Sex slave trafficking is one of the largest, fastest-growing, and most profitable illegal industries in the world. Most sex slaves are minors and women who are trafficked from different parts of the world to the U.S. For pimps, women are like merchandise to be purchased and sold by men. Despite a war fought over a hundred years ago to abolish slavery in the United States, such modern-day enslavement of minors and women secretly forces them to serve as men’s pleasure in America. This is not something that can be tolerated. I’ll also focus on explaining how the sex trafficking system works, how the system is so corrupt that it has become part of the current social issue across America, and explore different cases to include Korean and Mexican

An anti-trafficking organization defined such business as “a form of modern-day slavery in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or labor services against his/her will” (National Human Trafficking Hotline) The 2016 National Human Trafficking Annual Report shown that of the 7,572 total cases of human trafficking, sex trafficking was specifically involved in 5,551 of the cases; in turn, it is the most frequent type of human trafficking in the United States. More specifically, the total number of victims was 7,572, and of all the victims, the number of female victims was 6,340. Moreover, 2,387 minors were trafficked in the United States, which is one-third of all involved in these cases. If the statistics are compared with last year’s report, human trafficking rose approximately 35% in one year (National Human Trafficking Hotline). Yet, those are just the cases reported to any anti-trafficking organization. There are still many victims and cases that have not been reported. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that although it is difficult to scope this problem’s accuracy, they estimate

In fact, the lack of sufficient attention to this kind of social issue has resulted in no reliable estimation of the actual number of victims or a way to prevent such underground business from continuing in our society. In the article, “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking in United States,” the author pointed out that some of the major commercial sex markets to include the United States, Jamaica, Japan, and the Netherlands maintain a sense of a “culture of tolerance.” By just focusing on the United States, the article stated that the “United States [is] shaped by a culture that glamorizes pimping and prostitution.” One can carefully notice that song lyrics, online or video games, clothing, and many media platforms are all promoting such a “culture of tolerance” that glamorizes pimps to be embodied in our daily lives. From my personal experience, I remember last year when my father accidentally bought a video game called GTA without checking the rating for my little brother to play. I went online to conduct some research on this video game in order to ensure it was appropriate for my little brother to play. I thought it was a car racing game, but surprisingly, there are certain scenes which include pimps and commercial sexual exploitation. As such, I do think that growing youth are lured into the commercial sex trade business, and the pimp culture is being normalized. The commercial sex trade