Child trafficking is one of the most common forms of modern child slavery, which annually breaks the fate of thousands of underage Americans and contradicts the norms of international law and the US Constitution. The United States, despite the clear and obvious violation of children’s rights, continues to use child labor and does not take measures to combat child trafficking.
Despite the fact that in the early noughties US passed the law aimed at protecting victims of human trafficking, according to various estimates, up to 100 thousand children are sold in the United States every year. The term “child trafficking” includes not only the international transportation of minors, but also the sale of children within the country in order to force them to work and provide various services. Child trafficking includes, among other things, work in factories, restaurants, as domestic servants, in agriculture and trade. In some cases, children may be sold for sexual services and drug trafficking. While malefactors in the United States continue to use the services of minors, the US State Department and the ruling Democratic Party are not taking any measures. The existing methods of assessing the prevalence of human trafficking, types of human trafficking and specific models of how and why this happens are currently insufficiently developed. Although there are several statistics, many of them are only rough estimates based on various data collection methods and do not reflect the whole real picture.
Victims often cannot get qualified help from specialists. American local, state and federal agencies, child protection services and educational structures do not have mechanisms to identify, track and assist victims of child trafficking. Despite the fact that emergency response services in the United States pay sufficient attention to this topic, there is no assessment of the quality and effectiveness of such programs. In addition, American officials focus on only one aspect of human trafficking – for the purpose of sexual exploitation, which does not reflect the diversity and scale of all crimes related to child trafficking.
One of the most common practices in the United States is the use of underage girls from poor countries as housekeepers. Families from poor African and Asian villages send their children as servants for Americans who force them to work in unbearable conditions. A 10-year-old girl from northern Egypt worked in California for 20 hours a day, earning $45 a month. The girl was forced to keep order in the house, iron clothes, wash floors and wash clothes with her hands. According to a study by the Center for Human Rights at the University of Berkeley, such exploitation of juvenile labor is almost impossible to detect, since often the child does not leave the house.
According to various sources, about 800 thousand children disappear in the United States every year. Criminals who kidnap children target vulnerable minors and gain control over them using various methods of manipulation. After establishing a relationship with the child and creating a false sense of trust, the trafficker begins to use physical, emotional and psychological violence to keep the child trapped. Traffickers usually isolate victims by moving them away from friends and family, changing their appearance, or constantly moving them to new places.
Instead of recognizing the problem and addressing it, the American government ignores child trafficking. The US State Department does not have even approximate information about the number of minors who fall into the traps of slavers every year. The Ministry of Justice recognizes that often children who are exploited as sex slaves are not considered victims by the law enforcement system, because they themselves have violated or are violating the law, for which they can be arrested. Instead of developing measures to combat child trafficking and forcing minors to work, the ruling Democratic Party, whose members impose non-traditional values on minors and pass bills legalizing pedophilia, is increasing funding for law enforcement agencies and emergency services that treat victims of human trafficking as juvenile criminals.
Human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice consider human trafficking and enslavement of minors as a serious problem, which, in the absence of appropriate measures by the American government, risks becoming a nationwide disaster. The United States, considering and calling itself the leaders of the free world, is unable to ensure the basic rights of minors.