Human Trafficking Victim Quotes

Emotional detachment from the plight of others — easily achieved by simply looking the other way — always favoured the perpetrators rather than the victims who were reduced to being inconsequential nonentities; were persecuted and denied legal and human rights; were starving, sick, and dying; were victims of Apartheid policies with racial segregations inclusive of political and economic discrimination; were harassed, internally displaced, or forcibly deported; were imprisoned, tortured, or simply “disappeared”; were enslaved, exploited, or trafficked; and were ultimately the victims of mindless massacres that defied the comprehension of anyone even remotely humane.

Human trafficking is not only an injustice to the victim, but it is an injustice unto the families and friends of that victim.

Children are the most vulnerable and susceptible to become victims of human trafficking.

The good news is that a victim of human trafficking does not have to remain a victim.

There is one absolute commonality amongst the victims of human trafficking; the loss of personal freedom.

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be 'Girl A' - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn't. It was about me. I am Girl A.

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.

Recent research has shown that traffickers are no longer just kidnapping individuals off of the street, but they are now employing new tactics to find their potential victims.

All too often, the victims of smuggling and trafficking are encouraged to engage in the use of illegal substances.

She listened to the silence. Her first thought was relief. He's gone. Her second thought was utter devastation. He didn't kill me.

The menace of human trafficking continues to endure only because, there are some heartless men who are taking advantage of the lives and bodies the gullible victims get trapped into.

A piece of plastic stole an entire species— In lobbies, in the bathroom, in an elevator, Ideas, reactions, and silent contemplations, During lunchtime, during mass, during his funeral, On the street, on break, on duty, Before the waiter brings the food and after the check, While the flight attendant bothers to request airplane mode, While a trafficked victim speaks to you in code, While the potential love of our life just walked past, While mother cooks with a recipe we forgot to ask.

Human trafficking is a real issue. It happens everywhere, even quiet, ‘safe’ little towns like the one I live in. The more I researched, the more horrified I became. There are more slaves today than there were 100 years ago.  The average age of sex trafficked victims is 13-14. Trafficking victims have a life expectancy of two years. 100,000 to 300,000 people are trafficking in the United States every year. Girls as young as five have been forced into child prostitution. Every thirty seconds, someone becomes a victim of human trafficking. I didn’t set out to raise awareness or to be preachy about the issue of trafficking, but I do hope you can take away the fact that this isn’t an issue that should be ignored. There is only a supply of slaves because there is a demand.

when you speak about feminism they like to hit you with things i call 'what about's– what about women in the middle east what about women in third world countries what about focusing on them and not the problems here and this all sounds good in theory yes we need to help them yes we need to help young girls trapped in child marriages yes we need to help women marred by acid attacks yes we need to help victims of human trafficking yes we need to help women who wil be imprisioned beaten killed for speaking out about their sexual assault for getting an abortion for leaving an abusive husband yes we need to help them of couse we do it is our job as decent humans to help them but we can help them and help ourselves at the same time we can help young girls in child marriages and we can fight to end the objectification of young girls here we can help women marred by acid attacks and we can work harder to arrest abusers and assailants here we can help victims of human trafficking and we can stop stigma and violence against sex workers here we can help women who will be imprisioned for speaking out about their sexual assault beaten for getting an abortion killed for leaving an abusive husband and we can also help women who will be imprisioned for killing their pimp and captor beaten for refusing to have sex killed for rejecting a man here women are still getting hurt here there is still not total equality here they say what about this what about that what about them i say well what about here they say nothing because that they mean when they say what about the middle east what about the third world countries what about them is what about sitting down what about shutting up what about not saying anything at all

Every victim of human trafficking needs a hero.

Victims of human trafficking have limited access to help and often do not self-identify, especially when they have been isolated from friends and family for long periods of time. Feelings of shame and fear of reporting to law enforcement may also add to a reluctance to seek help.”   —National Human Trafficking Resource Center

Once a ‘Romeo Pimp’ has gained a victim’s trust, he systematically breaks down her resistance, support systems, and self-esteem. Victims are coerced into submission through gang rape, confinement, beatings, torture, cutting, tattooing, burning, branding, being deprived of basic needs, and threats of murder.”   —The State of Human Trafficking in California

A bill to provide services to victims of human trafficking—people, most of them women, who have been kept in domestic servitude and sex slavery—and to fund new anti-trafficking police units, is being blocked by Senate Democrats, who object that the legislation will not permit public funds to be diverted to the coffers of Planned Parenthood:

Instead of the vulnerable person (who has now disappeared), the illusion of the invulnerable person is created - the person who, by definition, cannot become a victim. No one - not women, drug abusers, people subjected to human trafficking, people living in poverty, illegal immigrants, or even children with no other option but to dig in the trash for food - can be called 'subjugated.' The ideal of the superman/superwoman becomes the natural condition of the human. For whatever this invulnerable person's fate - to be screwed by multiple men per day, take drugs and contract HIV/AIDs at ten years of age, have her body covered in bruises, lie passively and let herself be used, or turn other children into slaves - she is, by definition, an active subject who exercises opposition and control. The only possible violence that can be exerted against her is by calling her a victim. It is worse than any other physical or psychological violation to speak of her as subjugated - only then does she become a victim. A consequence of this belief system is the conviction that if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators. The unmentionables, the men, are completely exonerated in a highly convenient, imperceptible way.

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

I am sick and tired of hearing, the universe knows best. If the universe knew best, no child would cry of hunger. If the universe knew best, no young girl would fall victim to human trafficking. If the universe knew best, nobody would have to struggle till death to feed their family. If the universe knew best, not a single person would ever become a refugee. If the universe knew best, not a single human being would have to suffer on the face of earth. Any universe or god that allows for such horrors to teach humanity lessons or whatever, got to be extremely sick. Insects from the sewers deserve more respect than such sick forces. The reason these horrors take place is that, contrary to all cowardly beliefs, there is no higher force concerned with human welfare. If we want these horrors to end, we gotta take the initiative to end them ourselves, without relying on prehistoric fairytales. So, stop all that supernatural nonsense, and take some responsibility for the world you live in. Stop delegating your human duties to a fictitious force and stand civilized wielding your backbone for a change.

The U.N.-backed International Labor Organization had carried out a study funded by the Japanese government, on the state of human trafficking in Japan. The report was scathing: Japan had failed to punish human traffickers or to take care of the victims. The Japanese government ordered the ILO to keep the report under wraps; it would never be published.

At any hour of the day or night, Stanton will get a call about the latest underage victim who was picked up in a prostitution bust or an undercover operation, and he makes his way to the detention center. He is always struck by how the girls change. When he first sees them in their "work outfits," they do not seem much like children, with skimpy dresses, daring hairdos, heavy makeup, and flashy nails. After they shower, clean up, and put on the detention center's sweatpants and tops, they lose their street-worn years. "Then it hits you, these are really just kids," Stanton says. Invariably, the girls are not receptive to him, at least not at first. They are tough, and they are angry, and Stanton knows he has to be straight with them. "I never try to bullshit them," Stanton explains. "These kids are sharp. They have radar. Their lives depend on reading a man, be it a pimp or a trick, so they know when someone is lying to them. You really have to be genuine to earn their trust.

She had disappeared a long time ago. Stolen by someone else. Kip was wrong. She couldn't earn anything when she wasn't worth having.

The kids separated from their parents suffer the same trauma as the victims of human trafficking, therefore the administration that conducts such savagery in the name of immigration law must face the same legal consequence as human traffickers do, and if law fails to hold them accountable, the people must do it.

Who are these girls? Where do they come from? How do they end up on the street? Outsiders- and that includes most police officers, judges, the general public, and politicians- mistakenly believe that if these girls don't like what they are doing they can just walk away. What a growing number of dedicated cops and community activists began to realize is that the illusion of choice is the biggest obstacle to getting people to see these girls as the victims they are. "In order to have a choice you need to have two viable options to choose from," says DIGNITY's Kathleen Mitchell. "The choice for these girls is not 'Do you want to turn a trick or do you want a wonderful life?' That's not even on the table." Most girls on the tracks are running from something worse they faced at home. In survey after survey, in one city after another, statistics show that prostituted children suffer prior abuse as a staggeringly high rate.

I'm proud to be part of a team that cares deeply about victims of human trafficking. Through technology like VR Eval and thanks to the generosity of donors and valued supporters, we believe we can help save lives. That is a good feeling. (Carlos Wallace speaking as a Board Member of More Too Life)

Obama declined to hold public services in the White House commemorating the National Day of Prayer, which had been the practice of his predecessors. • In September 2011, his Department of Health and Human Services terminated funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for its extensive program to assist victims of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. The reason? Objections to Catholic teaching on abortion and contraception.7 • In 2013 Obama’s inaugural committee forced pastor Louie Giglio, whose Atlanta church was nationally known for its efforts to combat sex trafficking, to withdraw from delivering a prayer at the inaugural ceremony after an audio recording surfaced of a sermon Giglio delivered in the mid-1990s referencing biblical teaching on homosexuality. When it came to praying at Obama’s second inaugural, no pastor holding to an orthodox view of Scripture had need to apply. • His Justice Department canceled a 30,000 grant to a program for at-risk youth because it allowed voluntary, student-led prayer, and the oath recited by its young charges mentioned God.8 • He advocated passage of a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act prohibiting private employers from declining to hire gays and lesbians that granted no exemption for religious ministries and charities. • The Defense Department canceled an appearance by Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse at a National Day of Prayer observance because of Graham’s alleged anti-Muslim bigotry. • Obama’s campaign removed a reference to God from the Democratic Party platform and only moved to reinsert it after news outlets reported the exclusion and controversy erupted. In rushed proceedings at the party convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the name of God was reinserted to boos from the delegates.