While on the plane to Thailand, I had the chance to watch the first movie of Taken. In the movie, a daughter is kidnapped into sex trafficking and how that came about, I thought, was quite Hollywood. She and a friend met a guy outside of the airport, to which they shared a cab with. The next thing you know, these men dressed in black suits rushed in and grab both girls, in broad daylight. Amazing isn’t it. I mean, these things only happens in Hollywood. Right?
My first ever official lecture in human trafficking blew my mind. Yes, foreigners can be kidnapped, stripped of their identity, and forced into sex labor. These things just don’t happen in movies, they are real life issues. In Thailand, people like the poor are targeted into human trafficking. They go in looking for any kind of job available and trafficker advertise these trafficking as a job or an opportunity. The people that take these jobs aren’t able to return and forced which ever business that are put into. These jobs ranges from being a fisherman on a boat to being a prostitute on the street. Even parents would sell their flesh and blood into trafficking. All men, women, and children are victims to this gruesome nightmare. They are stripped of their identity, stripped of their human right, stripped of their power, stripped of everything.
All I was thinking was, “Wow, what an unfortunate thing Thailand is facing.” As lecture continued on, I begin to realize that human trafficking is actually a world phenomenon, globalization. In an article I read, America is actually “second largest region of destination for trafficked women and children, with as many as 50,000 trafficked victims annually”(Garrett-Akinsanya). American GIs were the one who introduced trafficking to Thailand. Human trafficking affects America as much as it affects any other country and I believe that because some Americans have the mindset of the “Almighty Americans”, we think that something like human trafficking would never be a problem with in the US. “The Twin Cities is the 13th most heavily trafficked metropolitan area in the U.S”(Garrett-Akinsanya). North Minneapolis is my home. I’ve lived on Morgan Avenue for eight years. Something so serious like Human Trafficking is happening in my backyard and yet, I had no idea whatsoever about it. It’s quite scary.
Let us all rewind and think about this. Human trafficking is a global problem and it has much to do with globalization. It is an illegal business that is operating internationally and each and every country in the world is connected to trafficking one way or another.
Garrett-Akinsanya, Bravada. “Human Trafficking: The New Slavery.” Insight News RSS. Insight News, 12 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 May 2015.
Our first mini lecture about Human Trafficking done by Achran Linda and Achran Cathy