Victims Analysis

    Today, sex trafficking has grown into a very lucrative business. According to the book Human Trafficking by Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, “Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States are very high trafficking destinations as reported by the United Nations”(25).  Many victims of human trafficking are women and children. They are usually promised a better economic future and fraudulent job offers for themselves and their families, but once to their destination, they realize they have been lied to. After getting trapped into the sex trade, the victims are usually drugged and beaten into submission. The women are forced to become prostitutes and work in brothels. The children are either sold off to the highest bidder or kept and prostituted to people that fly to trafficking destinations to have sex with them. These are doctors, professors, and lawyers.
    How could there be a business of selling people? This question goes through my head numerous times whenever I hear about human trafficking. Like the title of my blog explicitly states, human rafficking is a modern day form of slavery. The only differences are the services being rendered and the people being sought out. For human trafficking, as I stated earlier, women and children are preferred, but during the time of American slavery, men were looked upon as the better investment. Slaves and human trafficking victims also receive much of the same treatment. Both are beaten, kept under close surveillance, and have an overseer, but one difference is that human trafficking victims are also drugged. This puts a twist on things. In drugging their victims, traffickers disorient them and make them unaware of their surroundings and what is going on, but if you think about it, slave masters did the same things to slaves by taking them to an entirely new place. They were disoriented, and although they were not drugged they did not know where they were. It was an entirely new place. In short, victims of all types of slavery feel the same things. This type of slavery and what the victims feel and go through is not much different than what happened during American slavery.

Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. "Human Trafficking." Google Books. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.