Human Trafficking Today

If asked if slavery existed in the United States today, most people would reply negatively, believing that slavery ended with the civil war, but that just isn’t the case. Slavery exists in the form of human trafficking, and in places that are closer to home than many may realize. Society itself has impacted human trafficking greatly, through turning a blind eye towards it, and by the lack of social deviance forced upon these horrendous crimes. This violation of human rights epitomizes the control held over those who are trafficked, generally women and children, and how certain gender and social classes are targeted over others. Society’s lack of education about human trafficking has caused the crime to grow into unimaginably wide-reaching …show more content…
“Governments treat human trafficking as a border issue and not a human rights issue,” said a sociology professor in an article relating to human trafficking. This quote implies that governments are doing more to protect their borders from being crossed with human slaves, as with any other drug or illegal item, than to work to free those slaves from places even within their own country. Humans are being treated the same as drugs that are being smuggled from one country to another rather than the people that they are. Since the government of a society views human trafficking in this way, these views are often carried over to society as a whole, which lessens the severity of the crime in society 's’ eyes. Human trafficking is a violation of human rights even more so than rape and murder, since they’re experience these same things on a commercialized scale for traffickers to profit from, yet authorities are not educated enough about human trafficking to truly crack down on the crime. Society has wrongfully addressed the seriousness of human trafficking, for it is truly modern day slavery that is flourishing due to the blind eye turned towards …show more content…
Society has been turning a blind eye to this modern slavery, ignoring it and the need to have others educated about it. Even so, society has still been affected by human trafficking through the wedges it widens between the social classes, the poor being inferior to the rich, and between the sexes, men being superior over women. By refusing to become educated about the topic, society has caused the epidemic of human trafficking to rise into an organization that rivals the drug trade throughout the world. So what can be done about it? People can tear the blinders from their eyes and begin to acknowledge the crisis that is going on in the form of human slavery, and begin to educate themselves on the topic to create the social idea that human trafficking is as deviant as any other crime, such as rape and murder, and should be treated as such in the eyes of society. The whole of society must come to learn that slavery is not gone, and exists in places scarily close to