With an estimated 27 million people in the world living in some form of bondage, human trafficking is the second largest criminal industry in the world. Slaves make bricks in India, they work on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast, they are forced to beg on the streets of Europe, their organs are sold on the black market in Asia and they are tricked or forced into prostitution all over the world.

Human trafficking is slavery.

Slavery is not a new concept. Modern technology and communication has transformed the old idea of slavery into a dangerous and illusive force called human trafficking. Human trafficking involves the buying and selling of human beings into some kind of forced work for little or no pay.

Human traffickers:

1. • buy and sell people over the internet
   

2. • they pose as boyfriends or as business owners with quality jobs to offer
   

3. • they may personally know their victims or are a friend of a friend
   

4. • they might simply be a normal person who have been given an unethical opportunity to make a bit of money by selling someone
   

Trapped by the lies of their traffickers and by their seemingly hopeless circumstances, trafficking victims feel like they can’t escape. They bitterly resign themselves to do the work they are being forced to do.

Victims of human trafficking come from all over the world. In Eastern Europe, young women look to Western Europe and North America for job opportunities. Going to a new country makes them vulnerable, especially if they don’t speak the language or they don’t know the person who is getting them the job. Many Eastern European women end up as prostitutes in the international sex trade, stocking brothels in Amsterdam and New York or working in rundown massage parlors in the United Kingdom.

In South East Asia, children are especially vulnerable to trafficking. Brothels in Cambodia and Thailand brim with children, some as young as five or six years old. A number of different reasons may mark a child’s journey into prostitution.

1. •Parents who are poor knowingly sell their child.
   

2. •A child may be kidnapped from their village
   

3. •Parents send their child to the city to get a job not knowing that the “job” is actually as a sex slave in a brothel.
   

All child prostitution is categorized by the US State Department as child trafficking.

The fight against human trafficking is a fight for human freedom. It is a fight to give all people everywhere the freedom of choice, the freedom to not live in constant fear, the freedom to pursue their own dreams and live as the sole owner of their life. Everyone should have the freedom to not be bought and sold.

That is why we are the Freedom Project, because we believe that freedom should exist for everyone.