There are four main, interacting causes:
Vulnerability due to:
- Poverty, particularly when it causes survival-based decision making
- Lack of education, particularly related to lack of access to survival resources, employment, and needed services,
- Economic conditions/lack of life-sustaining work in country of origin
- Cultural factors including equity and equal rights of women, equal rights of children, history of bonded labor, customs of early or involuntary marriage.
- Inequity related to ethnic, cultural, or language demographics..
- Social and political instability including escaping war, persecution, violence, poverty, environmental disasters, or human rights violations.
Greed, including:
- Exploitation of labor to maintain low cost structures in response to consumers’ demands for very inexpensive products,
- Corporate promotion of cheap human and material goods and services,
- Trafficking is lucrative. It is the third largest criminal industry in the world today, after arms and drug dealing, and is the fastest growing. Traffickers generate billions of dollars in profits every year while victimizing millions of people around the globe.
- Sex trafficking is one of the most lucrative sectors of the trade in people, and involves sexual exploitation in prostitution or pornography, bride trafficking, and commercial sexual abuse of children. Labor trafficking is widespread not only in situations of domestic servitude and small-scale labor operations, but also in sweatshops and farms that are subcontracted to major multinational corporations.
- Market demand for commercial sexual exploitation continues to increase, which overwhelmingly impacts women and girls and fuels the growth of human trafficking. This includes first-world and local demand for sex tourism and pornography.
- Globalization as it reflects the global flow of migration, labor and capital, the feminization of migration, violations of human rights and corporate practices which destabilize grassroots communities and thwart alternative livelihood economic policies.
Corruption, including:
- Corruption in government,
- Corruption in law enforcement,
- Corruption of fundamental human values, including sexualization of the human body, inequality of women and children, widespread acceptance that not every one has equal human rights, and social policy/political policy that places the desires of those in power above the needs of those who are powerless.
Invisibility:
- Human slavery exists “just beneath the surface” of our society.
- It exists in every country and in every state in the US.
- It exists in every ethnic group and any vulnerable person is at risk.
- Once we accept that it is there, and know what to do when we suspect it, we are on our way to decreasing or ending it.
