History of Feminism
In reply to the discussion: Sweden's Prostitution Solution: Why Hasn't Anyone Tried This Before? [View all]ismnotwasm
(42,531 posts)There are women who are not trafficked who do the costal circuit on, say the west cost. They travel up and down, hitting the big cities until it gets hot. It used to be Seatlle, Portland, San Fransisco, all the way to San Diego, and further. There is no way to accurately estimate the numbers of these women, as they are working voluntarily. Trafficking is something else-- their families may have sold them or may miss them. There is a paper trail of how many "domestic workers" enter a country. Not all trafficking is sexual in nature. In other words, reasonable estimates can be made.
Pimping and mob connections to trafficking are very real. The fear is very real. There have been misguided attempts to "save" trafficked workers who end up right back where they were in the first place because there was no other viable option
Are these the numbers you doubt?
In 2013, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline, operated by Polaris, received multiple reports of human trafficking cases in all 50 states and D.C. Find more hotline statistics here.
The International Labor Organization estimates that forced labor and human trafficking is a $150 billion industry worldwide.
There is no official estimate of the total number of human trafficking victims in the U.S. With 100,000 children estimated to be in the sex trade in the United States each year, it is clear that the total number of victims nationally reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors and sex trafficking and labor trafficking are aggregated.[MF2]
The number of human trafficking cases that Polaris learns about increases every year. Read our 2014 statistics report here.
http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/overview