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Human Trafficking

Use this guide to find and evaluate information and resources related to human trafficking. It will also help deepen your understanding and ability to analyze issues related to human trafficking.

Use this guide to find and evaluate information and resources related to human trafficking. It will also help deepen your understanding and ability to analyze issues related to human trafficking.

Human Trafficking Awareness

About Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking: A Grave Violation of Human Rights

Human trafficking is a hidden crime as victims rarely come forward to seek help because of language barriers, fear of traffickers, and/or fear of law enforcement. Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Every year, millions of men, women, and children are trafficked in countries around the world, including the United States. It is estimated that human trafficking generates many billions of dollars of profit per year, second only to drug trafficking as the most profitable form of transnational crime.  Source: The Blue Campaign, U. S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

faces of victims of human trafficking

 

Definition, U. S. Legislation

Human trafficking is a crime involving the exploitation of someone for the purposes of compelled labor or a commercial sex act through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. Human trafficking affects individuals across the world, including here in the United States, and is commonly regarded as one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time. Human trafficking affects every community in the United States across age, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic backgrounds. 

Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age (22 USC § 7102).

Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, (22 USC § 7102).

For more information on these legal definitions, click here to visit the NHTRC Federal Laws page.

Elements of Human Trafficking

Trafficking in persons has three constituent elements;

The Act (What is done)

Recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons

The Means (How it is done)

Threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person in control of the victim

The Purpose (Why it is done)

inforgraphic that repeats elements of human trafficking

Source: Human Trafficking, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC

Current Federal Anti-Trafficking Laws

Related Guides

St. Louis Community College Libraries

Florissant Valley Campus Library
3400 Pershall Rd.
Ferguson, MO 63135-1408
Phone: 314-513-4514

Forest Park Campus Library
5600 Oakland
St. Louis, MO 63110-1316
Phone: 314-644-9210

Meramec Campus Library
11333 Big Bend Road
St. Louis, MO 63122-5720
Phone: 314-984-7797

Wildwood Campus Library
2645 Generations Drive
Wildwood, MO 63040-1168
Phone: 636-422-2000