OPINION:
As America prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, we will rightly reflect on the extraordinary freedoms secured by our founders and defended by generations of Americans. The Declaration of Independence established a revolutionary principle that every person is endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet one of the greatest threats to those ideals is not found on a distant battlefield. It exists in every state, every major city and countless communities across America. It is modern-day slavery.
Human trafficking is the systematic theft of liberty. It strips away dignity, exploits vulnerability and reduces human beings to commodities for profit. There may be no greater contradiction to America’s founding ideals than allowing slavery to flourish in the nation that first declared liberty to be an unalienable right.
After more than a decade working alongside legislators, prosecutors, law enforcement, survivor leaders and technology experts, I have learned that trafficking is one of America’s most misunderstood crimes. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, nearly 18,000 potential victims are identified each year in the United States, yet experts agree these numbers represent only a fraction of the true scope of trafficking because it remains one of the most underreported crimes.
The victims are children recruited through social media, teenagers manipulated through online gaming platforms, women escaping abuse, foster youth searching for belonging, veterans rebuilding their lives and vulnerable adults targeted because someone saw an opportunity for profit.
Traffickers are often not strangers. Research has found that in some child sex trafficking cases, up to 47% of victims were trafficked or facilitated by a family member or caregiver.
Technology has only magnified the crisis. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children receives millions of CyberTipline reports each year on suspected online child sexual exploitation. Approximately 460,000 children are reported missing annually in the United States; that’s 1,200 a day.
While many are recovered safely and may not be trafficking victims, traffickers deliberately target runaway and vulnerable youth because they know these children are among the easiest to exploit. One national study identified more than 100,000 online commercial sex advertisements every day across the nation’s largest commercial sex marketplaces. Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization estimates that forced labor and sexual exploitation generate approximately $236 billion in illegal profits each year, making human trafficking one of the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprises.
These numbers tell us something profound. We cannot prosecute our way out of this crisis.
Although some 18,000 potential victims are identified annually, the federal government averages only about 184 federal human trafficking prosecutions each year. Even in Texas, a leader in anti-trafficking legislation, only 28% of trafficking arrests resulted in trafficking convictions over nearly two decades.
Justice matters, but justice alone is not enough. After helping advance 82 anti-trafficking laws across 20 states, I have become convinced that prevention not simply prosecution must become America’s next frontier. Parents need tools to recognize online grooming. Children deserve age-appropriate digital safety education. Schools, churches, healthcare providers, businesses and technology companies must work together to identify exploitation before it becomes tragedy.
America has faced great moral tests before. The generation of 1776 challenged tyranny. Lincoln’s generation confronted slavery. Our generation must confront the buying and selling of human beings in the digital age.
As we celebrate 250 years of liberty, perhaps the greatest tribute we can offer those who came before us is not simply remembering the freedoms they secured, but ensuring those freedoms are protected for the next generation. History will not judge us solely by the liberty we inherited. It will judge us by the liberty we chose to defend.
• Tami Brown Rodriquez is CEO of Untrafficked, a national nonprofit dedicated to preventing and combating human trafficking through education, technology, intelligence and legislative reform. She is a nationally recognized speaker on human trafficking, digital safety and public policy.
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