Who Can Be Sex Trafficked?
There are many misconceptions about sex trafficking in our society, including the question of who is being sex trafficked.
These misconceptions sprout from the belief that victims of sex trafficking are only foreigners smuggled into the country, children who are kidnapped off of the street, or young girls who are taken advantage of when they travel to faraway places. While these scenarios most certainly happen, the reality is that sex trafficking does not discriminate; there is no one “type” of sex trafficking victim. It can happen to anyone, no matter where they’re from, what kind of family they have, how old they are, or what they look like.
As found by Polaris Project, in a case study of over 1600 sex trafficking victims who are U.S. citizens, about 70% were adults, 35% were minors, 94% were female, 4% were male, and 0.68% identified as transgender. “Trafficked persons can be rich or poor, men or women, adults or children, and foreign nationals or US citizens.”
Since 2014, Rescue America has served hundreds of survivors of sex trafficking, including a man whose husband exploited him, a single mom trying to provide for her three kids, a woman tricked by a friend and brought to a different state, a man wanting out of the porn industry, a migrant forced to work in a strip club, a young woman sold by her family since childhood, and so many more. They have ranged from 18-60+ years old, and have called from more than 100 different cities and locations across the U.S., from an apartment in Manhattan, New York to a shelter in Hungry Horse, Montana.
A survivor may be a runaway foster child who feels unwanted, a struggling mother looking for a way to make ends meet, an insecure boy looking for someone to call friend, a person in desperate need of a job…
There really is no visual trend that makes up a sex trafficking survivor, but they have all had one thing in common: every survivor we have served has had a vulnerability that a trafficker saw, abused, and exploited.
Traffickers will prey on anyone that has a vulnerability they can take advantage of. They identify a person’s place of need and make a promise to fill that gap, grooming their victims by building a relationship, reliance, and a felt connection with them, and then they later manipulate, exploit, and abuse them.
The sad reality is sex trafficking can happen to anyone, because everyone has vulnerabilities, but there is also an additional factor at play: the environment. It is less common for a person to be trafficked out of a home in which their vulnerabilities are nurtured, than it is for a person to be trafficked out of a community in which their vulnerabilities are an advantage to the wrong person.
This is why, when a survivor calls our Rescue hotline, we work to help them get away from their “play pen and their play mates,” that is, away from the community in which their vulnerabilities have been used to manipulate and exploit them.
At Rescue America, no matter where a survivor comes from or what their story is, we believe there is a redemptive solution for every survivor who desires to exit the life of sexual exploitation. There is always hope for new life, and it is our honor to be able to come alongside them and extend a helping hand as they take their first steps to freedom.
If you feel a call to get involved and serve survivors of sexual exploitation across the country, click here to learn how you can.
You can take action today by spreading the truth with the people you know; to equip yourself with the facts and stay up to date with rescue stories from the frontline, sign up here.
