Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is all around you and you don't even notice. This TED talk by Noy Thrupkaew talked about going to her therapist and getting questioned who raised her until she was three-years-old and she had always thought it was her parents. Until one day she went up to her parents and had asked them who had taken care of her when she was younger and they had told her that her Aunty had watched after her.
She started talking about the memories she had of her aunty and the clearest memory she had was when her aunty was being beaten and slapped by another member of their family. Noy remembers crying and screaming when witness all the harm that was happening. Her aunty was beaten behind closed doors. It got so bad that her aunt had to run away.
Thrupkaew talked about how her aunty was only 19 when she came to the states and had cared for Noy when she was a child. Her aunt was on a tourist visa. She ended up meeting her aunt again in Thailand at a political rally. She was scared to reach out to her aunt because she was not able to help her aunt out but her aunt was able to help her out.
She goes on to talk about how we don't pay attention much to human trafficking and how we haven't done much to prevent it. We don't educate each other much about how it's happening all around us. We only know the simple details of human trafficking and push it aside. But there is something more to human trafficking that not all of us are educated about.
68% is forced labor
22% is forced prostitution
10% is state- imposed labor
The things we have and purchased are by workers that are part of human trafficking it is not just forced prostitution. Thai military was caught selling workers on the ship and if they did not do well they are punished badly.
She even talks about how human trafficking can be in nail and hair salons. Young kids are put to work and made little money but all taken away from them.
We need to do something about it instead of just sitting there. The criminal justice system is not as helpful as people would think.
20-60% of the sex trade was rape or assaulted by police alone.
They only helped 50,000 out of 21 million victims so far. Which is not a big dent at all. That would be only the population of Los Angeles.
Human trafficking happens in systematic degraded work environment, which is the United States.
Speak out and do more research on human trafficking. It is happening all around us and we need to make a stop to it.


Here is some more information on human trafficking.

https://polarisproject.org/human-trafficking

- Josephine Pham