Noah Tanguay

Ciolek 3rd
January 13th, 2020

Low Income Families are at More of a Risk to Human Trafficking

Families around the world get their children taken from them. Sometimes they run away,
sometimes they get lost, but most of the time it is someone taking their children. They are taken
to become sex workers and forced laborers. This is shown to be a huge problem in large cities
where people can be easily taken and put into horrible situations. But most people that get
trafficked are from lower income areas.

It is found from Polaris, that most people that are trafficked are found in big cities where
it is easier to find people in the 14 to 18 year old age range. This is the ideal for traffickers as
the need for young people in the human trafficking
industry never stops. They are always need more
people to be laborers, and make them money.

It is found that most people that are

trafficked for their labor. Polaris says of 40.3 million
people that are human trafficked, 81% of them are
doing forced labor. This just shows how the sex
industry is just one part of the bigger issue with
human trafficking. The forced labor side of things
make it truly a much bigger issue. The 32.6 million
people being forced into labor, they provide over
150 billion to the people that bring them in. That is 150 billion dollars that shouldn’t be there. 150
billion of illegal money. 150 billion of dirty money. These people are some of the nastiest people
in the world. These are the people you want to stay away from, but really nothing compares to
what they do to get people trapped into these types of things.

Human traffickers can easily trap poor and vulnerable people since they are in need of
money. In the book SOLD by Patricia McCormick, the main character Lakshmi is a poor country
girl who thinks she is going to help her family because the trafficker said she would get a good
income and could give it back to her parents. In reality this is just not the case. She was forced
into sex and labor. She got no money and was torchered to her bones. This is just one story.
There are millions of others where a vunerable person gets pushed into the human trafficking
industry.

Another person that was put in a horrible position was Brandon, a poor city boy from
New York. He thought that if he went to work, he could help his family out of poverty. In reality,
he did not get to see his family again for another 10 years. He was put into a labor camp and
had to do forced labor. He had to sit in a factory under horrible conditions without breaks,
enough food, enough sleep. Everything that you or I would take for granted, he had to hope he
would get a bite to eat, maybe a few hours of sleep. His life was ruined by a simple
misjudgment. A misjudgment that millions of people make. A misjudgment that is very easy to
make a person that lives at the poverty line. He didn’t have to imagine not being able to see
your family for 10 years. He actually lived it. He got put into an impossible situation that no one
wants to be in.

People around the globe get the same treatment as Brandon. But most of those people
are poor. The wealthy people of the world very rarely get human trafficked. Yet they are the
ones that we see in headlines. “Rich families son from suburbs get abducted.” There are
countless amount of headlines just like that. Yet that only makes up a small percentage of the
people that are human trafficked each
year. More than 85% of people that
are trafficked are within 10% of the
poverty line. This just shows that
people in bad situations are exploited
and beaten to a pulp to get every last
dollar out of them. In fact, the US
Department of Labor states that there
are 148 products from 75 countries
that are made from forced labor and
people that are trafficked. That is just
the tip of the iceberg though. There are many other products that simply do not know who
produces them. Which is just scary how many things that we use everyday was made by
someone who was forced to be there. Someone who gets basically nothing. No pay, barely any
food, no breaks. People living in their beautiful homes do not even have to think of the people
that made their drink, laptop, desk, and coat to name a few.

Low income people are targeted for human trafficking because low income people are
more vunerable then weathly people since they have to barely scrape together enough money
for food each week. On top of that, traffickers know how money is hard for low income areas
and they do not have the resources to try and get a family member back. This makes low
income people even more of a target than others.

Low income areas are known to be hot beds for human trafficking. I hope to spread
awareness about the topic and we really need to show how we need to make it a priority to give
low income areas assistance and do our best to keep people safe in all parts of the world.
Including low income areas, and areas where slums are the primary form of housing. There just
is not an excuse to not help people who need it and we need to show that we as a state,
country, and globe care about human trafficking and we need to get rid of the culture that has
formed around human trafficking.