Food for thought on Justice..........

For those of you who know me, you know that my true passion as far as what I want to do with my life is focused on doing work in sexual violence prevention/intervention as well as human trafficking (including sex trafficking...or just trafficking).  Naturally, I hope that my time in Honduras this summer will lead to someday doing work in this area only in Central America.  


I cannot blog for long today, however, I wanted to leave you with these brief statistics.....I'll post more later on this topic....however, hopefully you will get an understanding as to why I would like to be a part of a movement that puts a stop to human trafficking worldwide.  


Trafficking stats:
-800,000 – Number of people trafficked across international borders every year. 
Source: U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report: 2007.

-1 million – Number of children exploited by the global commercial sex trade, every year.   

Source: U.S. Department of State, The Facts About Child Sex Tourism: 2005.

-50% – Percent of transnational victims who are children. 

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Report to Congress from Attorney General John Ashcroft on U.S. Government Efforts to Combat     Trafficking in Persons in Fiscal Year 2003: 2004.

-70% – Percent of female victims who are trafficked into the commercial sex industry. This means that 30% of female victims are victims of forced labor.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons: 2004.

Additionally, as many as 100 Honduran children have been smuggled overland into Canada from Honduras, by a professional drug ring trafficking children to Vancouver. The Honduran smugglers pay the childrens’ transportation costs and help them across the Canadian border. Once in Vancouver, the traffickers put the children in apartments, help them file refugee claims and sign up for welfare. In return, the children are turned out on the street as indentured drug dealers. (Adrienne Turner, "Drug ring lures kids as dealers: Hondurans as young as 11 deal crack in Vancouver," Ottawa Citizen, 20 July 1998)

Lastly,the majority of the street girls (homeless girls) in Honduras are victims of prostitution. ("The Situation of Street Children in Latin America," Bruce Harris, Executive Director, Latin American Programmes, Casa Alianza/Covenant House Latin America, 9 October 1997)  All homeless girls in Honduras, who engage in "survival sex" in exchange for basic necessities, were initially victims of sexual abuse in their homes. (Casa Alianza study, "Former Honduran Street Girls Travel to Canada for International Summit of Sexually Exploited Youth," 2 March 1998).