Ending Human Trafficking

At its core, human trafficking is the exploitation of people’s emotional and physical vulnerabilities for profit—and it is highly profitable. Globally, human trafficking generates $150 billion a year for traffickers, with two-thirds of this income deriving from commercial sexual exploitation. The issue of human trafficking can be broken down to simple economics, supply and demand. People tend to think of human trafficking as a female issue, but 99.9% of the buyers of these forced and coerced sex acts are men and, surprisingly, many of them use the same words that sex workers use to describe their experience—shame, scared, lonely, trapped—to describe what drives them to buy sex. We must address this demand side of the equation with wisdom and compassion, and acknowledge that a man’s journey to buying sex is just as broken as women’s journey to being sold. In so doing, we can hold men accountable in an empowering way to stop a commercial sex trade industry that is exploiting the most vulnerable people in our city and world.