Raise Awareness About Human Sex Trafficking with RED LIGHT GREEN LIGHT
As hard as it might be to wrap our minds around, slavery in the United States is alive and thriving in the form of human trafficking.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.” And it’s big business, bringing in more than $99 billion a year globally — with sex trafficking leading the way.
“It’s an epidemic,” Cindy McCain, the head of the McCain Institute’s Human Trafficking Advisory Council, told Fortune Magazine recently. “It’s everywhere — it’s absolutely everywhere.”
Here are some key figures from Polaris, a nonprofit that works to combat human trafficking:
— From 2007 to 2017, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received reports of 34,700 sex trafficking cases inside the United States.
— In 2017, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children estimated that 1 in 7 endangered runaways reported to them were likely sex trafficking victims.
— The International Labor Organization estimates that there are 4.8 million people trapped in forced sexual exploitation globally.
If you’re an educator or activist looking for resources to help raise awareness about the prevalence and pernicious growth of human sex trafficking, we highly recommend our video Red Light Green Light, which trains its sights primarily on the growing global demand for modern-day sex slaves. Filmmakers Jared and Michelle Brock talk to sex trafficking survivors, former prostitutes, law enforcement officials, and leading experts in the field across ten countries, digging deep into the cultural attitudes and institutional practices that have propelled the industry and hampered efforts to fight it.
