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20 Ways You Can Help Fight Human Trafficking
To close out the week for posting, I wanted to leave you all with this. I have been constantly searching for more information in regards to making a difference and taking action. Something that I have really been wanting to find out more about is how I personally can get involved and make a difference all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, as a college student graduating in a semester, with lots of debt. The crisis of sex trafficking sometimes overwhelms me because I want to aid others and make an impact, but my voice seems small and insignificant.
From the U.S. Department of State (Diplomacy in Action), I find a link to 20 Ways You Can Help Fight Human Trafficking. I plan to take some of these steps in order to start doing my part in ending trafficking in our generation. I encourage you to do the same and check out the link below.
20 Ways You Can Help Fight Human Trafficking
Sources
Sex Trafficking and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
As I have spoken of in earlier posts, the tragic lives that women and young girls face today is not okay. I use the words, “not okay,” but “uncalled for,” “outrageous,” and “shocking” would fit the bill as well. Taking a look at the emotional trauma, not just physical, will be a great step into understanding more, educating ourselves, and making a change with the wisdom that we have. My focus today will be on mental health treatments for victims of human trafficking, especially in regards to post-traumatic stress.
Many studies have discovered serious and often difficult mental health needs when it comes to victims of human sex trafficking. Post-traumatic stress disorder has been most commonly found, and a wide variety of symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder that were severe were noted in the lives of the victims. The victims range from experiencing or witnessing serious injury, threat to themselves or others, intense fear, helplessness, and even horror. Preexisting conditions also play a part in the resilience or outcome of the victim, but overall the exposure to trauma is the most important feature when it comes to developing countries. Post-traumatic most often will occur within the first month of exposure to the traumatic event, although that is not always the case. Delayed presentations of post-traumatic stress can occur up to years later. Even though PTSD occurs within both adults and children, women are more likely to be vulnerable to the disorder and take a longer time to recover.
Within trafficked women, the top five post-traumatic stress disorder associated symptoms were: recurrent thoughts/memories of terrifying events, feeling as though the event is happening again, recurrent nightmares, feeling detached/withdrawn, and unable to feel emotion. These survivors of devastating traumatic experiences have also been found to suffer from other anxiety and mood disorders and also at an increased risk for development of dissociative disorders.
The most important aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder and the victims of human sex trafficking is that they receive the proper trauma related services in order for them to receive the help that they need. The most common mental health therapy based upon post-traumatic stress disorder, are behavioral (focuses on increasing desired behaviors), cognitive (works to change behavior and feelings), and psychodynamic (explains behavior and personality). The top five evidence-based therapeutic treatment options for post-traumatic stress disorder are the following:
Cognitive Therapy: a type of psychotherapy in which negative patterns of thought about the self and the world are challenged in order to alter unwanted behavior patterns or treat mood disorders such as depression.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: a type of psychotherapeutic treatment that helps patients to understand the thoughts and feelings that influence behaviors.
Exposure Therapy: a form of behavior therapy in which a survivor confronts feelings or phobias or anxieties about a traumatic event and relives it in the therapy situation.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: a psychotherapy that emphasizes disturbing memories as the cause of psychopathology and alleviates the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Stress Inoculation Training: a form of cognitive behavior modification that involves an educational, rehearsal, and application phase.
Above are just a few of the steps and options of therapy that victims of trafficking can pursue. The problem that remains is getting aid to victims in developing countries filled with poverty. The consequences of not receiving mental health care for trauma are too severe and destructive.
I encourage you to check out the Polaris Project, which informs, and does outreach work within the United States, as well as internationally.
Sources
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2003, September). Medical examination and treatment for victims of sexual assault: Evidence-based clinical practice and provider training (Report to Congress: AHRQ Publication No. 03-R210). Washington, DC: Author.
American Psychiatric Association. (2005, January). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
American Psychological Association. (2008). Psychology matters: Glossary. Retrieved from http://www.psychologymatters.org/glossary.html#p
Family Violence Prevention Fund. (2005). Turning pain into power: Trafficking survivors’ perspectives on early intervention strategies. San Francisco, CA: Author.
International Organization for Migration. (2006). Breaking the cycle of vulnerability: Responding to the heath needs of trafficked women in east and southern Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: Author.
International Society for the Study of Dissociation. (2004). Guidelines for the evaluation and treatment of dissociative symptoms in children and adolescents. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 5(3), 119–150.
Mayo Clinic. (2007, March 1). Mental health: Dissociative disorders, treatment and drugs.Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/dissociative-disorders/DS00574/DSECTION=treatments-and-drugs
National Institute for Clinical Excellence. (2004, December) Depression: Management of depression in primary and secondary care (Clinical Guideline 23). London: Author.
Office for Victims of Crime. (1998, August). New directions from the field: Victims’ rights and services for the 21st century, mental health community (NCJ No. 172819). OVC Bulletin. Washington, DC: Author.
Office of Mental Health and Addiction Services. (2008, December 2). Trauma. Retrieved from http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/addiction/trauma.shtml
Personal Stories
I believe that one of the greatest ways that people can gain insight into topics that is “swept under the rug,” or hidden in the dark, is through personal testimony. A personal testimony or significant story from someone’s life is what makes the biggest difference. It is what separates true from false, light from dark, and exaggerations versus haunting realities. Stories of trauma are real, gripping at life in the deepest way possible and examine a person’s darkest points in life. Trauma has a universal dimension in the sense that all human have the capacity to experience and express fear, helplessness and horror, but trauma does not have one single definition. Each person in their traumatic experience reactions differently and the possibilities of post-traumatic growth or resilience differ not just between cultures, but peoples. Immediate reactions to trauma may be similar across the world, but culture may determine various reactions that may occur across time.
The psychological anguish that is experienced universally after trauma may be more related to an interference of the central morals or beliefs of the affected culture, community, or individual. As a victim recounts their story often feelings of intense distress, sever physical reactions to reminders of the event, and even flashbacks can occur. Pounding of the heart, rapid breathing, nausea, muscle tension, sweating, and nightmares are just a few of the things that can occur as a person re-experiences their trauma.
Here is an account from actress Emma Thompson that was a highlight of an article from Newsweek. For most of her life she didn’t know that sex trafficking was happening in her very backyard in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t until 2006 that she started working with a foundation that aids abused victims. She shares the personal story of 19-year-old Elena.
“When I was growing up in London, I walked past a massage parlor on the way to school every day. If my friends and I ever gave a thought to what went on behind its doors, we saw it as a bit of a giggle; it existed in a world away from our own.
Fast-forward 30 years to 2006, when I first met 19-year-old Elena through my work with the Helen Bamber Foundation, a U.K. charity that helps abuse victims. Elena’s story was all too common but had a huge impact on me.
An intelligent girl with ambitions, Elena had been enticed to London from Moldova with a promise of a good job and a bright future. Once in the U.K., however, her passport was taken from her and she was kept in solitary confinement to break her will. She was warned that her family in Moldova would suffer harm unless she did what she was told. And then she was put to work as a sex slave, servicing a procession of men in the most appalling circumstances.
What made her story so personal for me was where she’d been imprisoned: the same massage parlor I’d once treated as a joke. It underlined an awful truth: that human trafficking is not just a problem for other communities or other people. It exists on our own doorsteps, and our lack of action shames us all.
It’s hard to put an accurate figure on the full scale of this misery. But the International Labor Organization estimates that there are at least 2.5 million forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking at any one time. Their plight can be seen as the hidden side of globalization: a sickening business worth more than $30 billion a year.
It is a crime that scars every region and almost every country. Some 120 nations are routinely plundered by traffickers for their human raw materials, and more than 130 countries are known as destinations for their victims.
Like Elena, these victims may end up in the sex trade. Many others find themselves condemned as slave laborers, forced to work in domestic service, in hazardous factories or at grim sites like the cocoa plantations of West Africa. Thousands more, many just children, become unwilling conscripts in bitter wars. Nearly all suffer physical or sexual abuse, creating mental and physical scars they carry for the rest of their lives.
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Above all, we have to keep our eyes open and not be afraid of letting our voices be heard. This is not a problem happening somewhere else. It is on all our own doorsteps.
Elena and many thousands of people like her need us to come to their aid. We can no longer keep walking past their door and ignore their cries for help.”
Sources
Adams, C. (2011). RE-TRAFFICKED VICTIMS: HOW A HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH CAN STOP THE CYCLE OF RE-VICTIMIZATION OF SEX TRAFFICKING VICTIMS. The George Washington International Law Review, 43(1), 201-234. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.er.lib.k- state.edu/docview/922467512?accountid=11789
Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Resick, P. A. (2001). Stress and Trauma. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
Thompson, E. (2008, Mar 17). Slavery in our times. Newsweek, 151 Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.er.lib.k-state.edu/docview/214258292?accountid=11789
The Reality of Human Sex Trafficking
The reality is that most people don’t know the haunting truths when it comes to human sex trafficking. It takes most people a trip to a foreign country or the daunting visuals via photograph or movie reel to really spark something within them to want to do something. Truth is… sex trafficking may be happening in your very back yard.
Human sex trafficking is not just slavery, but it is a large multi-million dollar business that is the fastest-growing business of organized crime and the third largest criminal enterprise in the world. Although most human sex trafficking takes place internationally, it also occurs domestically. The estimation of American youths that are at risk of becoming victims of the commercialized into sexual exploitation is at about 290,000. Many of the victims within the United States are runaways who eventually become forced into prostitution some coming from abused families and others who have been abandoned. Others are “recruited” into prostitution from being abducted or even through deceptive agreements between the parent and trafficker. The poor victims are forced into this industry and taken away from any chance at a normal life, but one revolving around violence, possible drugs, and constant threat and danger.
In today’s world, sex trafficking is continuously getting more violent and organized with women and young girls being locked up in room and brothels from sometimes months at a time. They are drugged, terrorized, and raped repeatedly as their traffickers begin to take control of their victims. Victims are controlled by their traffickers through continued use of drugs, force, emotional, tactics, and finances. Something that has especially happened within international sex trafficking is that these youths have been promised something in return of giving into prostitution. The trafficker and family formed a promise that they would be given money, and husband, and a healthy marriage. Sadly, the outcome is that the traffickers take advantage of the fact that these young women have no male figure in their lives anymore and they no longer have bonds to the outside world. These women are stuck with healthy boundaries, relationships, or daily lives.
This modern day form of slavery is occurring more often than you may think, and it is happening all over the world. This is beyond being just a national problem, but a local one. Women and young girls should not be subjected to having their human rights violated and forced into sex-slavery due to the lack of resources, poverty, domestic violence, and finances. This problem must end in our generation.
Sources
Bekteshi, V., Gjermeni, E., & Mary, V. H. (2012). Modern day slavery: Sex trafficking in albania. The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 32(7), 480-494. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01443331211249093
Walker-Rodriguez, A., & Hill, R. (2011). Human sex trafficking. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 80(3), 1-9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.er.lib.k- state.edu/docview/856990689?accountid=11789
End Trafficking in Our Generation 