January is also known as Human Trafficking Awareness Month. It is a key time for us all as individuals to educate ourselves about human trafficking and crucially to learn to spot the signs of trafficking. It is also a time for us take these messages to our workplaces, our churches, our schools, our representatives and everywhere else.
Human trafficking is a crime where one person exploits another for labor, services, or commercial sex, using force, fraud, or coercion (or where the person induced is under 18 years of age, in the case of a commercial sex act under U.S. law).
The crime must also involve the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provisioning, or acquisition of a human being for these causes and through these means. Human trafficking is included under the umbrella term “modern-day slavery,” where victims cannot leave a situation of exploitation and are controlled by threats, punishment, violence, coercion, or deception.
