While the realities of human trafficking are always harsh on a personal level, it is important to look beyond our own revulsion at the practive of slavery and to see the causes of that slavery.  We can call it an economic problem or a social one and phrase it in terms of opposing forces of morality and immorality or we can examine it in the framework of violence against women; today, it’s important to remember its economic roots.

We’re in the middle of a global economic recession that started because of a bubble in the U.S. housing market (effectively, the extension of credit by financial agencies without any evaluation of the applicant’s ability to repay, plus bundling these mortgages together and trading them) and a new kind of contract called a CDS (effectively, an insurance policy against something that you don’t have to own being worth less than an agreed upon amount; they all became due at the same time when the economy went downhill) and a few other factors.  How does that affect human trafficking?

The good news is there’s a lot less disposable income, which means both (1) fewer people are able to spend money on prostitution and (2) the gap between the rich and the poor for the most part decreases, at least in absolute terms.  That gap (look up the Gini coefficient) contributes to the supply and demand of trafficked women because of its connections with disposable income and standard of living.

But the bad news is worse for many.  Simply put, if you have less money–particularly little enough that you or your family are in what you see as desperate straits–it’s a lot easier to be exploited, to not ask so many questions when given the promise of a new life, to want to believe the friend of a friend who promises you a new life with him in America or Germany or Canada.

It’s also bad because criminals will feel it in their pocketbooks, which means they will increasingly turn to low-risk high-return investments like human trafficking in order to buoy their profits.  People who aren’t involved will want to get involved, and because there are fewer people with the money to buy prices will go down in established settings, and women in those settings will be more disposable than ever.

Remember, today slaves cost far less than they did when slavery was legal in the United States, and the slaveowner doesn’t have even the tiny legal responsibility toward his slaves he did back then.  Economically speaking–though the practice of slavery has always been abhorrent–slaves were very expensive once.  Now that they’re relatively cheap, they’re worth a lot less to the criminals who buy them, and so are more disposable and more vulnerable to abuse.

And they die of HIV in their mid twenties.  It’s not a pretty picture.  Help us end it: talk to your friends about it, talk to your family, spread the word about slavery.  It’s one of the worst human rights abuses in the history of man, but we can make a difference in the fight against it.

Best Regards,

Terry Lee Wright