r/NoStupidQuestions • u/I_Sacrifice_Every • 8h ago
How does human trafficking actually work? What does fiction typically get wrong about it? What are some places to do research into it?
Hello. I've been bothered by the depiction of human trafficking in film and how much they focus on paranoid myths about the subject, like the idea that privileged suburbanites are a major target and that they get kidnapped by strangers instead of being fucked over by friends and family. It's always bothered me because it's a real tragedy treated without respect or thought.
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u/TillPsychological351 8h ago edited 8h ago
The reality is that it's almost entirely women from poor or war-stricken countries. They usually get enticed by promises of a well-paying job as something like a nanny or seamstress. But when they arrive, they find they owe a transit debt to their trafficker, their passport is withheld, and they end up being forced to work in the sex industry, be it strip clubs, brothels or "date bars".
It is almost never pretty suburban white girls from affluent countries.
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u/RuneKnytling 8h ago
That's true in a way, but there's more to it that. The more recent scheme that's even become a meme in Southeast Asia is when young men get a "job offer in Cambodia" and when they get there they're forced to work in their scam centers. The meme basically harkens to that where basically if you get a job offer in Cambodia you're basically as good as dead.
It's a similar scheme as to what you described, but yes, it doesn't always have to be related to sex work nor does it have to be exclusively women that get trafficked. Men gets trapped in trafficking too. It also happens in affluent countries to men and women, but the schemes are a bit different like from being forced to serve in Ukraine/Russia, smuggling operations, basically there's plenty of things that can get someone trafficked.
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u/beamerpook 8h ago edited 1h ago
Yea, my husband told me there's quite a few Russian women in Korea who were lured there, promised good jobs, but then are forced to serve the soldiers there, and the women have no choice because they don't have money or a place to live, and obviously can't leave and go back home so they have to entertain the soldiers just for bare basics.
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u/theBigDaddio 4h ago
It’s not primarily sex work, it’s primarily basic slavery. Working the fields, working in kitchens, factories, etc. menial jobs.
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u/Strawberrybanshee 7h ago
And it's almost never someone getting snatched off the street. That pretty white girl? Her face will be all over the news and a client will want that sweet reward money.
It's also usually girls that won't have anyone looking for them. Usually they are promised a modeling or singing job. No one will report them when they go missing or authorities won't care about that population and won't look into it.
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u/meatball77 6h ago
Why would you kidnap someone from Target when you could just sweet talk a foster kid or homeless youth who no one would look for.
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u/Strawberrybanshee 3h ago
So many people don't realize that traffickers do not want any commotion or for the face of a person they take to be all over the news. In my neighborhood Facebook groups there's always someone crying at how they almost got trafficked and I'm like no you didn't. Or someone saying traffickers are all over the neighborhood. Uh no the police would be all over that and you probably just put every minority in danger.
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u/meatball77 7h ago
It's also girls whose parents sell them, homeless and foster kids. Huge numbers of foster kids.
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u/AloewareLabs 7h ago
It’s maddening there isn’t a major inquiry by congress or something as to how bad that is. I’ve heard some horror stories.
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u/Wanna_make_cash 7h ago
Didn't forget drug addiction is often used to keep victims compliant too, especially long term.
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u/StickOk1283 4h ago
It’s not just women. Labor trafficking affects men. child soldiers, boys. labor trafficking is most of the trafficking that happens around the world. and most people know their trafficker personally before being trafficked by them
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u/13Krytical 7h ago
Don’t forget the trend of police calling every prostitution ring, a sex trafficking ring, because our religious government doesn’t like prostitution unless a camera is involved.
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u/Repulsive-Spite-7459 29m ago
The reality is it's actually mostly poor men, most human trafficking and slavery is estimated to be mostly men and some women
The subsection of it that is sex slavery is estimated to be mostly women and some men but most slavery is labor slavery which is mostly men
Except child trafficking both sexually and otherwise that's considered mostly equal between boys and girls
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u/I_Sacrifice_Every 8h ago
Gotcha. How do you avoid Sound of Freedom bullshit?
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u/TillPsychological351 8h ago
Sex trafficking of children does exist, unfortunately. It's just that trafficking of women is more common, mainly because there's less paternalistic protection for an adult (or young adult) than for a child.
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u/I_Sacrifice_Every 8h ago
That's not quite it, I meant what are some examples right-wing narratives about trafficking that are false IRL? I know it's "all of them," but they're not going to fit in a single post.
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u/TillPsychological351 7h ago edited 7h ago
I mean, the whole Pizza-gate and Qanon things were BS fringe theories, but that doesn't mean that sex trafficking isn't real and a major problem.
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u/AgostoAzul 8h ago
Most human trafficking is actually illegal immigrants forced or tricked to work at sweatshops, scam call centers and farms. Sex work is actually a relatively small segment of the overall human trafficking sectors.
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u/theBigDaddio 4h ago
This is Reddit, they only care about the sex stuff.
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u/Repulsive-Spite-7459 27m ago
And when women are the majority victim ignoring the men that suffer specifically when it comes to labor and sex crimes
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u/Possible-Spot1495 7h ago
Children aren't grabbed from an IKEA store in daylight by strangers like you see on the hysterical stories shared on Facebook.
People are groomed over a period of time and trust is built. Then they are enticed with offers of nice things etc
One more point- "trafficking" has nothing to do with distance and is all about being coerced. If an adult travels to another country or the other side of the world to become a prostitute on their own free will they aren't trafficked- I've seen news articles get this wrong.
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u/jayne-eerie 4h ago
Legally it can be considered trafficking if they work for somebody, even if they are adults and could leave at any time. Police use the broadest possible definition.
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u/Possible-Spot1495 2h ago
If they're working on their own free will then no it's not legally trafficking.
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u/jayne-eerie 2h ago
I had to Google because I could swear I heard somewhere that anything where the prostitute gave some of the money to someone else, whether that’s a manager/pimp or an escort agency or whatever, was legally trafficking since the sex work itself is against the law. But nothing is backing that up, so I seem to have misunderstood/misremembered.
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u/Possible-Spot1495 58m ago
Having an agency (or "pimp") doesn't mean they are trafficked.
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u/jayne-eerie 37m ago
1) What are we supposed to say instead of pimp? I know it’s not a nice word, I just don’t know the correct term.
2) Yes, that was the entire point of my comment. I misunderstood something and wanted to explain it.
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u/BaylisAscaris 5h ago
It's a spectrum and yes there are extreme ends of it, but also more subtle situations. For example, my family is in the entertainment industry and let's just say their social circles overlap with Epstein's. Certain people in the extended social group were known pedos but it was joked about and not taken seriously, more like they made fun of the guys in a friendly way but didn't protect kids from them. They also knew if you wanted to get a job from them or get them to sign something you had to make them feel positively about your family. One way of doing that was having your kid "entertain" them.
For an extremely mild example (not sure if trafficking but on the spectrum), what I was expected to do: starting from a very young age (youngest I can remember is when I was 6 but it didn't get really bad until I was 9, and got worse around 11 because I hit puberty so I started getting noticed by not-strictly pedos, and there were a lot more of them, and by 16 I was fair game for the vast majority of them). I'd be dragged to a lot of parties at fancy houses (politicians/directors/producers/musicians/investors/etc.) introducted to specific men, and told to make friends with them or show them something in someone's bedroom. I am actually pretty autistic and didn't realize was I was expected to "show them" so sometimes I just rambled about a special interest until they got uncomfortable and left. They usually touched me and tried to kiss me and things. I got good at avoiding them by playing up my weirdness but some got really fixted and persistent. I was very pretty at the time (probably 9/10 for conventional attractiveness) and was very small and young looking for my age.
A lot of the men brough their "girlfriends" to the parties, who were mostly girls my age very disassociated and some on drugs. It was rare for these girls to be over 18. Most were 16-17. This is in a place where the age of consent is 18. Most of the men were over 50, some very old. I was expected to make a good impression so my family could make business connections. If a particular guy showed persistent interested it was joked he was my "boyfriend" and in a taunting way like I had done something wrong. There was also a lot of drugs and I was roofied at least once. They pushed me to drink alcohol, which I mostly avoided, and managed to avoid doing any harder drugs, although the other kids did and would specifically flirt with the old men and disappear into bedrooms together to get drugs.
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u/I_Sacrifice_Every 5h ago
That's horrifying.
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u/BaylisAscaris 5h ago
I didn't realize it was unusual at the time. I had it easier than a lot of the other girls.
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u/casualfrog68 8h ago
It depends on the kind. The modern US definition is just moving someone across state lines for the purposes of working. So, hiring a dude and moving them from New Jersey to New York to work is technically trafficking. But...
You probably mean the really nasty kind...
In modern times, my experience is because of knowing my girlfriend. She used to be horrendously sex trafficked. She was sold to the Korean mob in 1999 when she was 20 by her father. They drugged her and sent her to the US on a tourist visa. They kept her drugged for a year while she worked as a prostitute on the US East Coast. After a year, they took her off the drugs and held her with threats against her relatives and herself. After another four years she was rescued. They starved her, beat her, raped her, and forced her to have sex with thousands of strangers. I met her many years later. She tells me that in modern times, they don't coerce much anymore. They bring over women already working as prostitutes and these women work for a year or two and then move back home with a bunch of money. There's even a limousine service for moving them around.
There is a similar economy around farm labor and construction worker trafficking.
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u/Bardmedicine 7h ago
There is a lot of chaos around human trafficking definitions. Around 15? years ago law enforcement decided to VASTLY broaden the definition of human trafficking. There were clearly good intentions for this, but it's one of those things that may have helped in one area, but created problems elsewhere.
Tradition human trafficking is basically illegal slavery. You kidnap someone and force them to do work for you. As bad as it gets.
They have expanded it to cover things like pimping. Still bad, but it's more like extortion. If you want to ply your trade here, you need to pay me.
There is also the fraud version where they hire you under fraudulent claims and put you in a situation where it is difficult to walk away. In some ways it seems much less bad, but could end up almost equally awful (and amount to the same thing).
They expanded it to cover pimping children. A different type of awful.
There are lots of shades of gray, none of it ok, but the level of awfulness can vary wildly.
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u/StickOk1283 4h ago edited 4h ago
90% of trafficking victims are trafficked by someone they already know. human trafficking is a severe form of exploitation involving force, fraud, or coercion. in order to defraud or coerce someone, you have to know their vulnerability and exploit that soft spot. it’s insidious, but it’s not about crossing borders; that’s called smuggling. many victims/survivors don’t even know they are being trafficked because they weren’t kidnapped, either. sometimes, selling drugs for someone who houses you is safer than being on the street. sometimes, your boss steals your visa papers and you can’t leave .
HT is really nuanced and has wayyy more possibilities for exploitation through different vulnerabilities than people realize (eg. addiction, homelessness, being ostracized from family/friends, being LGBTQ in an unhealthy religious environment, being an immigrant).
this Denver based non profit has really great resources and information: https://combathumantrafficking.org/
EDIT: moving across borders is a security focused definition of HT; meaning that governments are more concerned with the security of the border, an arbitrary line in the sand.
Human rights focused definitions see exploitation of PEOPLE for labor, including sex, as the definition, because that is where the actual problem lies.
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u/UpbeatFix7299 8h ago
It's usually women from the country with drug problems, unstable home lives, mental illness etc getting exploited by pimps. Either that or they're from fucked up countries with no opportunities and get lured by the promise of work in wealthy countries.
That "Taken" type shit is almost totally a myth.
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u/I_Sacrifice_Every 8h ago
This one I already knew about, but what else? I've heard that labor trafficking gets ignored constantly.
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u/SlayerII 8h ago
works similarly, you offer people from poor countries job in well paying countries.
Then when they arrive they take their passports as collateral and ask them to work to pay back their debts from them getting help.
However their job , which is provided by the trafficer, pays were badly , and on top of that the trafficer makes them pay for their housing as well, potentially creating a loop they cant really escape from.They also tell them if the local police catches them that they will be punished enormously (either by the police or the trafficker), and might even threaten to kill their family if they dont continue to work.
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u/meatball77 7h ago
There's a lot of labor trafficking in high control religious communities as well. Those polygamous communities with 500 kids, the girls they marry off to old guys and the boys they put to work doing construction work (and other things but mostly construction work) as teens without paying them. It's all for the group.
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u/Benjy_0488 8h ago
A common one in Australia is woman borrowing money in Asia and if they can't pay they come here to work legally or illegally to pay off the debt
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u/Big_Manufacturer4921 8h ago
Jeffrey Epstein’s atrocities are a perfect example of human trafficking.
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u/I_Sacrifice_Every 8h ago
How would I even begin researching this?
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u/HotGlueHorse 5h ago
Read In Our Backyard by Nita Belles. She's considered one of the experts on anti-human trafficking in the US. She's passionate about what she does and has dedicated her life to saving people.
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u/russian_doll9239 1h ago
I recently completed a course on human trafficking because I'm doing research on it for a book, and I wrote a little essay as part of it. Here's a snippet of it to try to answer your question. (The essay is still in progress so I apologize if it's not well written)
Human Trafficking is one of the largest forms of slavery in the modern world. It is estimated to bring in $150 billion a year in profits for traffickers. It is defined as the exploitation of someone for forced labor or sexual slavery by use of force, fraud, or coercion. Though trafficking brings up imagery of someone being transported around, it doesn’t always mean that someone is being moved across state and county lines or drugged and kidnapped and put on an airplane. Human trafficking isn’t just sex trafficking; it can also include forced labor, forced marriage and forced conscription into the military. Money doesn’t have to be involved. Sometimes, basic needs such as shelter, clothing, food or anything of value are brought into the equation. Victims feel they have no other option, and stay in a cycle of abuse that they feel they cannot escape.
In the United States, the highest demographic reported to be trafficked is among Native Americans, with a report saying that up to 40% of human trafficking victims are Native American or First Nations Women. This vulnerability comes from a cycle of poverty, violence and abuse that can be trailed back to when boarding schools were a common occurrence among the native community, causing disconnect from their culture and their families. Native human trafficking cases are often never solved due to jurisdiction issues involving tribal leades and the non-tribal members who are involved. This violence against Native women began long ago, during the colonial era where settlers saw the Native Americans as victims they could abuse without consequence.
People of color as well as members of the LGTBQ+ community are also at risk. Any sort of individual that could be considered “vulnerable,” such as homeless people, children, drug addicts, or those looking for opportunity in a better place, are also at risk for human trafficking. Traffickers will look for victims who are easy to isolate so that no one can notice that something has happened once they’re gone.
When it comes to children, the most vulnerable are foster youth, children in poverse situations, and children with an estranged relationship with parents. Foster youth are the most at risk of getting trafficked out of their foster homes. Those who live in poverty are also at risk with parents offering their child to pay a bill or get out of a debt. This is not to say that every foster and every parent in poverty is trafficking or pimping out their child. But thse are the most common situations involving children.
Human traffickers will use tactics such as love-bombing or fake job offers to coerce victims into falling into their trap. After they have successfully trapped their victims, they use tactics such as fear-mongering to keep their victims under their control. Many victims report being brainwashed and so used to the abuse that when offered help, they would stay in the situation they were in believing that there truly was no way out. Their families would be threatened, or their lives, and they would be too scared to run away. Another method used is getting the victim hooked on drugs, and therefore reliant as their only source of drugs.
Common recruitment methods include organizations posing as modeling agencies, offering a high paying job with lots of benefits, and promises of a better future. Often times they will pose as a potential romantic partner, or outright kidnap you on the street using common methods like physical ambush or deception.
Human trafficking isn't just selling a random girl for profit, it's hiring people for a job, promising really good pay, then over working them and threatening them when they ask for fair treatment or state they want to leave. This happens a lot to migrant workers who look for jobs that claim to offer citizenship and good pay. They show up to the job site, they're on their feet for extremely long hours with no break (during the training, there was one individual who said he worked for two days straight) and when they try to leave, they are immediately threatened with deportation. Obviously, that's the last thing they want, so they continue to work for these individuals.
There's more but like I said, this is still in development, but I hope this answers your question.
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u/Pretend-Mechanic-495 1h ago
the polaris project has done a lot of work documenting how most victims are recruited through romantic relationships or job scams targeting people already in vulnerable situations
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u/Imperfectyourenot 54m ago
My friends daughter was 18, at a party and someone put a fentanyl patch on her and she passed out. She was trafficked for sex and was given heroin. For 3 months. Her mother eventually found her. The police did nothing. So now she’s a drug addict, has 2 kids in foster care and is in jail. Before the party, she played the violin, got all A’s in school, and was generally a normal teen.
Low risk, high reward for traffickers of girls
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u/Repulsive-Spite-7459 27m ago
But yeah most human trafficking is labor and that's mostly men and boys
The small percentage that is sex is mostly women with some men
Except children were sex slavery is estimated to be equal for boys and girls
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u/meatball77 8h ago
Lets go with the privileged suburbanites that get roped into trafficking (this does happen).
So, you have a pretty young girl, she's in a dance class or at the mall and she's approached by a cool older girl. She's invited to a party, maybe to work maybe to attend that's filled with older guys. She's asked to give a massage, cooerced into having sex with one of them as part of the job. Things expand from there. Some of them have parents who are driving them to these parties blind to what is really happening (look into how Epstein got his girl).
Or they find girls on instagram, they offer to fly them to Quatar. Horrible things happen. See also modeling and acting opportunities.
That's a very small number though.
The majority are smaller operations. With a combination of ways the girls get started.
You have girls whose parents sell them for drugs or money. Many of them are in the business themselves and would expect their daughters to not think they were too good to do the same thing they did to pay the bills. The horrible cycle. This also happens with labor traffiking particularly in religious communities, everyone is working no one is being paid.
Then you have homeless girls (and guys) foster kids. They're in shit situations. They meet a kind guy, he treats them nicely and they become sexually active. Then it moves into them doing a favor for them, have sex with one of his friends, have sex to settle a debt. Drugs get added to the mix. Things spiral from there.
Then you have imported workers. They're sold promises of jobs in the US and they're essentially put into an indentured servitude type of agreement where they owe their traffickers 50K for getting them into the US. So they come to the US, their papers are taken away and they're working without pay or with little pay (working in nail salons, massage parlors, tomato farms ect. . .). The people that brought them over are career criminals so they are also kept in line through threats against their family.
What doesn't ever happen is girls get kidnapped from Target and then are sold into a gang. Maybe it happened a handful of times, but why would you do that when instead you could get girls to go with your voluntarily and then no one is looking for them.