Coloradans Against Sex Trafficking

The Difference Between Child and Adult Sex Trafficking As I continued to investigate the truth behind human trafficking, especially in the US, I wanted to discover what the differences were between child and adult sex trafficking. I wanted to discover how children are targeted differently than adults, what countries have the most thriving child trafficking rings, and how these children's lives are affected? Did you know that 54% of human trafficking victims are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation? Not only that, but an estimated 2,000,000 children are sold every year in the global sex trade. The worst-ranked countries for human trafficking are Russia, China, Iran, Belarus, and Venezuela. Worldwide, almost 20% of trafficking victims are children. According the the National Human Trafficking Hotline, “Human Traffickers target victims using tailored methods of recruitment and control they find to be effective in compelling that individual into forced l...

Why Should I Care? Maybe you’re a single mom, overstretched and busy. Or a college student, broke and sleep-deprived. Or maybe you’re a small business owner trying to single-handedly get your business off the ground. It’s not that you don’t care about human trafficking, and it isn’t as though you don’t know about it. It certainly doesn’t mean that you don’t care. You don’t need to be guilted or spoken down to. You aren’t a belligerent child who didn’t take the garbage out. I’m not going to sit here and try to scare you (or myself) into dedicating your whole life into the fight against human trafficking. It’s unrealistic. But, as it turns out, it’s possible to do little things in your busy, active life that can help the victims and join in the fight. Amanda Finger, co-founder of The Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking, explains why Colorado is so instrumental in the trafficking trade of the U.S. “We’re in the middle of the country, and that makes us a destinatio...

CAST and Me When I was very little, my Dad and I had an unspoken weekly tradition - watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on CBS. One day, as we settled in to watch, I realized that I had no idea what that week’s episode was about. The focus was (you guessed it!) human trafficking. As D.B. Russell and his team scrambled to find the perpetrators and heroically save the victims, I struggled to wrap my head around the concept. As far as I knew, traffic was the thing that my parents stoically faced down every morning in the car, the thing everyone complained about. So in my childish mind, human trafficking took the form of large lines of people all queueing up to get somewhere or do something. Imagine my relief when, at the end of the episode, the CSI team captured the men who were forcing these poor people into torturous, long lines! Unfortunately, the reality of the human trafficking issue is a lot less tame and much more sordid than my young mind could comprehen...