Last year January 11th was recognized as National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, and the month of January was recognized as National Human Trafficking and Slavery Prevention month. Last year, I started off my blog with some great information about trafficking which you can read here. Will you click over and read, and then come back to this post? There are some great links with some practical steps you can take to help end human trafficking.
It’s 2011, and a new year, and still trafficking and slavery are huge concerns. People are being bough and sold for less than $100 and there have been documented cases below $30—for a HUMAN BEING!!! I get angry and sad when I think about it. This isn’t the way this world was meant to be, and there are an estimated 27 million people in our world today who are suffering in slavery. Many of them are trafficked to another country where they don’t even speak the language.
The majority of the individuals who are trafficked are women and small children. They are sold, enslaved, and forced to work for next to nothing.
I’m writing this post for much the same reason as I did last year. I believe that the first step to combating a problem like this is greater awareness that the problem exists. I feel like most of us live life believing that slavery died with the American Civil War, but today the problem is worse than any point in history.
There may be people trafficked in your own town. As I mentioned in a blog post last year, my friend Charles Lee gives 11 tips for ways you can take an active role in combating slavery and trafficking.
If you’ve got a few minutes, read up on the issue a little more, and then, start a conversation with someone about the issue. Talk to a classmate, a coworker, a family member or a friend. Resolve to do something beyond reading. Invest some of your time and resources into supporting organizations that fight human trafficking. Report suspicious activity to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
May we never tire of fighting injustice. As Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
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