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How Choices Affect Teens

The choices that teens make are crucial to whether or not they are put at risk to be approached by trafficker. A teen who runs away hasn't thought through the fact that they don't have the ability to feed, clothe, and house themselves. Within 48 hours, a runaway is approached by a trafficker. Teens who are truant and go out to places like the mall or movies put themselves at risk for being trafficked because they are without their parents.

Teens who choose to engage in risky behavior such as drinking alcohol, doing drugs, going to parties, or interacting with stranger all put themselves in a position where a trafficker could easily manipulate them. This is especially if they are drunk or high and there inhibitions are lower.Online risky behavior is also just as dangerous. Teenagers who talk to strangers in chat rooms or give out personal information are putting themselves in a position where a trafficker can all get all the information they need to lure them away by pretending to be someone else and sharing common interests. With the invention of sites like Facebook or Myspace, anybody can be a “friend.” All they have to do is send a request and if you accept they are your “friend” who now access to all your information.

The third choice that affect teens is who is they choose to hang out with. Friends who try and get you to engage in risky behavior such as drinking or using drugs are not your friend. A friend is someone who cares about your well being and who doesn’t want to harm you. Hanging out with friends who engage in bad behavior puts you not only at risk for being influenced but it can also put you in a bad situation in which you could be approached by a trafficker such as at a party or a club.

How Situations Affect Teens

Teens who are dealing with negative issues within their lives often will do whatever they can to numb the pain and escape. Teens who are being abused, sexually or physically” are put at a greater risk for being trafficked. this is because a teen who is suffering from a abuse may run away from their homes to escape only to find themselves homeless and on the streets. Most often, a teen who runs away hasn't thought through the fact that they don't have the ability to feed, clothe, and house themselves and usually within 48 hours of being on the street, a runaway is approached by a trafficker.

Teens who are born into poverty are also at risk. In worst case scenarios, mothers have sold their own children into the sex trade in order to gain more money for themselves. (Source)

Other Factors Affecting Teens

Foster care is another big factor affecting teens when it comes to trafficking. A child may run away to avoid foster care, they may run away if they are being abused or if they don’t like who they are living with. A teen in foster care may also feel unloved and unwanted and a trafficker will often play on this by telling them that they love and want to care of them. Low self-esteem and naivete are two major things that a trafficker looks for within his or her victim because it makes it easier for them to use methods of deception by playing on their weaknesses. They will tell their victim everything they want to hear and will pretend to be their boyfriend in order to build levels of trust and then before the girl teen knows it they are being trafficked.

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Introduction to the Victim

"A minor goes from being a target to a victim

usually in as little as 30 days. Traffickers use

deception, grooming, abduction, and coercion

to lure their target into becoming a victim."

The highest probability victims are: truants, runaways, abused or neglected children, and foster children. They aren't reported missing because they are runaways, throwaways, and abused children. Another reason children aren’t reported missing? Parents who are engaged in drug use often do not report their child missing because they don’t want the police coming to their home and investigating.

Victim Rescue Rate: Less than one half of 1%  (.004)

The number of victims has increased exponentially in the United States, with approximately 20% of all Human Trafficking cases coming out of Texas.  The primary target for traffickers is American girls aged 12 to 14. However, this crime is not limited to girls only. At least 20% of underage victims of sex trafficking are boys. At least 95% of all the commercial sex engaged in by boys is provided to adult males.Many of the adult male sexual exploiters of boys are married men with children. Boys are more likely than girls to leave home due to a feeling of being unwanted or misunderstood regarding their sexual orientation. Similar to girls, most boys exploited through sex trafficking come from dysfunctional homes and a large percentage have been the victim of some kind of abuse in the past .

Below is a graph of who gets arrested when it comes to trafficking. From the information provided we can see that the victim has the largest number of arrests over both the john and the trafficker. Instead of helping the victim, the victims are being treated like common criminals while the johns and traffickers go free.

The average life expectancy for a child forced into sexual slavery is 7 years. For a child who gets abducted at the age of 12, by the time she reaches 19, she will already be dead or significantly traumatized for the abuse she endured. This is why it is so crucial to help every victim we can. Every arrest of a victim that took place was a missed opportunity to help rescue that child and because their life expectancy is so low, that one arrest could be the only opportunity for that child to be saved.

So why do we tend to treat victims like criminals? It’s simple, society glamorizes the pimp (in books like “Pimpin’ for Dummies” or shows like Pimp My Ride), normalizes the john (everybody is having sex) and blames/shames the victim (she did it because she wanted to). Society’s perspective on prostitution is that all women involved in the sex trade are prostitutes, tramps, and sluts. This is NOT true. Many of these so-called “prostitutes” are actually sex-trafficked victims being forced and threatened to work in the sex trade.

“Children are primed to accept pornography and sex trafficking through the messages they encounter daily in media and pop culture. Modern music glorifies the lives and actions of pimps." (Source)

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The Role of the Trafficker

"Traffickers are skillful in their manipulation tactics.

They know precisely what to say and do to get their victim to do

exactly what they want. They play precisely on the weaknesses they know their victim has and are so smooth and sweet talking that

getting their target victim to go with them is almost too easy."

What Do They Look Like?

A Trafficker can look like anyone or anything. Traffickers can come in the form of men, women, couples, college students, classmates, and teenagers. They can be rich or poor, famous, a professional, or just your average joe. A trafficker has no set look. They only thing they have in common is their agenda - to deceive youths and coerce them into the life of trafficking.

A common myth about human sex trafficking is that traffickers and johns are always men. Though statistics prove that more men are caught trafficking than women, the number of women caught trafficking has increased. Women who are victims of sexual abuse, including sex trafficking, were taught at a young age to use their bodies for profit - they continue this cycle by running trafficking rings as adults. ( Source: Fox 40 News & SacBee)

Types of Traffickers

• Individual Traffickers (usually known as boyfriend pimps): This person adapts the role of a “boyfriend” in order to deceive his victim into thinking that he loves them. He will spend time with them, tell them he loves them, and get them to trust him in order to more easily lure them into the world of trafficking.

• Trafficking Rings: Organized person(s) who has a group of victims that he or she sells for sex. They may post the girls services online or send them out to the streets.

• Organized Crime Professionals: Soliciting their victims in a professional manner such as in online ads in which a photo and number are posted soliciting the victim’s services.

• Celebrities: Celebrities tend to glamourize the life of pimps in order to get people to accept it as an everyday thing. One famous rapper in particular was noted by the FBI to be a known trafficker within the celebrity world.

• Classmates/Peers: Most peers who are attempting to bring in their classmates are often themselves a victim of trafficking who are being forced by their trafficker to bring in new victims, otherwise they may be punished, beaten or killed.  They are instructed to glamourize the life of trafficking and make it appear as if it is an everyday common thing.

• Trafficker/Bottom “B” Girl Couple: The trafficker and his bottom girl work together to recruit new victims. The trafficker uses his bottom girl or “favorite girl” to lure in other victims. The job of the bottom girl is to make sex trafficking sounds as appealing as possible and make it appear as if the life of trafficking is the life she always dreamed of.

• Victim-Turned-Trafficker: The Victim turned Trafficker is usually a woman who once used to be victim herself but has now escaped and because the world of trafficking is the only thing she knows, she may start her own trafficking ring, in which she is no longer the bottom girl or victim, but now she herself is the Trafficker luring in girls.

Types of Pimps (Roles that Traffickers adapt)

• Boyfriend Pimp: offers love and affection to lure in their victim

• Gorilla Pimp: uses violence to scare his victims into trafficking

• Business Pimp: uses his victims to gain money by selling them

A trafficker typically earns over $200,000 per year selling one sex trafficking victim. Drugs can only be sold once but victims can be sold over and over.Victims represent hundreds of thousands of dollars for traffickers who "own" them, because traffickers have more than one victim working for them at any given time. Gangs are replacing drugs and weapon sales with human sales.

Traffickers (‘Pimps’)    --->    GREED & POWER Driven

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