Human Trafficking is not in my community.
Human trafficking cases have been reported throughout the United States.
Trafficking victims are usually foreign-born or always immigrants from other countries.
Many trafficking victims are US citizens – men, women, and children.
Human trafficking victims always come from situations of poverty or from rural villages.
Poverty alone is not a causal factor or universal indicator of a human trafficking victim.
Victims of human trafficking will immediately ask for help or self-identify as a victim of a crime.
Victims of human trafficking often do not immediately seek help or self-identify as victims of a crime. It is a misconception that all victims of human trafficking are physically restrained and/or not free to leave. Trafficking does not require physical restraint, bodily harm, or physical force.
People being trafficked are physically unable to leave their situations, locked in, or held against their will.
That is sometimes the case. More often, however, people in trafficking situations stay for reasons that are more complicated. Some lack the basic necessities to physically get out – such as transportation or a safe place to live. Some are afraid for their safety. Some have been so effectively manipulated that they do not identify at that point as being under the control of another person.
Human trafficking only occurs in illegal underground industries.
Trafficking has and can occur in legal and legitimate business settings as well as underground markets.
Traffickers typically abduct victims by forcing them into a vehicle.
Traffickers often build relationships with their victims before harming them. Many survivors have been trafficked by romantic partners, including spouses, and by family members, including parents.
Human trafficking is always or usually a violent crime.
The most pervasive myth about human trafficking is that it often involves kidnapping or physically forcing someone into a situation. In reality, most traffickers use psychological means such as tricking, defrauding, manipulating, or threatening victims into providing commercial sex or exploitative labor.
Human trafficking is another term for human smuggling.
Smuggling is a crime against a country’s borders. Human trafficking is a crime against a person.
Human trafficking involves moving, traveling, or transporting a person across state or national borders.
Human trafficking is often confused with human smuggling, which involves illegal border crossings. In fact, the crime of human trafficking does not require any movement whatsoever. Survivors can be recruited and trafficked in their own hometowns, even in their own homes.
Labor trafficking is only a problem in developing countries.
Labor trafficking occurs in the US and in other developed countries but is reported at a lower rate than sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking is the only form of human trafficking.
Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to get another person to provide labor or commercial sex. Worldwide, experts believe there are more situations of labor trafficking than of sex trafficking, but there is a much wider awareness of sex trafficking in the US than of labor trafficking.