Imagine a person going to their first day at a job. But instead of arriving at work they are kidnapped and forced to become sex slaves. This is exactly what happened to a young girl named Brittany. Brittany needed a job and a man told her he had one for her. On her first day at work, the man said he would take her to work. The man then took Brittany to a hotel and drugged her. She was abused and forced to have sex with many men. Fortunately, she managed to escape and contact the authorities (“Survivor Stories”). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Brittany's story is one of thousands that victims of sex trafficking are forced to live with. She is one of the lucky few who managed to escape the grasp of this terrible crime. Unfortunately, sex trafficking is a very real problem here in the United States and current laws and regulations do not adequately address the problem. The U.S. government must pass tougher laws and provide more awareness and education to help stop sex trafficking. To fully uncover this issue, it is crucial to understand the scope of sex trafficking and the current legislation surrounding it. It is also critical to convince those who don't believe sex trafficking is a problem how wrong they are. According to the United States government, sex trafficking is defined as “the recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sexual act” (Weitzer 1337). Prostitution is the driving force behind sex trafficking, although there are people who are not forced into prostitution. In sex trafficking, prostitution is forced. The people who carry out the trafficking are called traffickers, pimps, pimps, and johns. Victims are threatened, abused and deceived by their traffickers. Traffickers often take advantage of desperate people. People in poverty or on the run are usually targeted. Many are given the promise of a job or relationship that appeals to them (“Sex Trafficking in the United States”). Some of the places where victims are kidnapped or sold in the United States are neighborhood brothels, escort services, strip clubs, and truck stops. “The Internet,” according to the Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization, “has been identified as the number one platform that exploiters, traffickers and johns currently use to buy and sell women and children for sexual purposes in the United States.” With access to all of these resources, traffickers and pimps are able to create networks and transport victims across the country (“Sex Trafficking in the United States”). Perhaps the most disgusting truth about sex trafficking is how many victims there are. According to a 2008 estimate by the International Labor Organization (ILO), there are 1.39 million sex slaves worldwide. Many experts argue that this is a low estimate and that the number is growing by hundreds of thousands every year (Smith 274). This is obviously a global problem, but it's also very real here in the United States. According to a 2007 study (George 563), between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked in the United States each year. This does not include those who are trafficked into the country. The reasons behind the growth are quite shocking. Technological progress and increasing globalization, despite their benefits, have significantly increased sex trafficking. With the world so connected, traffickers are able to take advantage of far more desperate people. Traffickers are able to buy these people at high pricesridiculously low and make huge profits from it. To put it in perspective, an average slave in America in 1800 cost 40 thousand dollars and today people can be bought for less than a hundred (Smith 275). Another disgusting reason for this increase is that the demand is so great. Even though prostitution is illegal almost everywhere in the United States, it is a growing industry. The traffickers simply satisfy that demand (George 563). For the most part, the general public is unaware of this problem. If people listened to these statistics or the stories of trafficking victims, there would be a bigger movement to stop trafficking. This is precisely the purpose of the newsletter “Stop Trafficking! Anti-trafficking newsletter”. They believe that being educated on the topic will provide real change (George 563). President Obama also recently addressed the issue of all types of trafficking, including sex trafficking. In her speech she said: "When a child is sold by her poor family - girls of my daughter's age - she runs away from home or is lured by false promises of a better life and then imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists." – this is slavery” (Keiner). One of the hardest parts of dealing with sex trafficking is identifying it. Many times it is almost impossible to know what is happening. It's a crime that happens in the shadows and you have to look to find it. Victims usually do not seek help from authorities for fear of what their trafficker will do or for fear of revealing what they have done. They feel like there is no hope of changing their situation and they are trapped forever. Because traffickers are able to control their victims with their threats, many times no physical slavery exists. In most of these cases, the only way to find out anything is for people to start asking around about a person, and even then sometimes it's too late to find them. This also makes it extremely difficult for law enforcement to know what is happening (Croce 401). If there were more programs to educate the public on this issue, many more victims would find the help they need. Victims would know that there are people willing to help. Groups like the Polaris Project offer many resources to assist victims (“Sex Trafficking in the United States”). To combat this enormous increase, the U.S. government has responded in recent years with several pieces of legislation. The law that started it all was the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) passed in 2000. This law helped define the various crimes related to sex trafficking (Farrel 1). It has been reauthorized four times, which has improved the law's ability to protect victims and prosecute criminals. This law also provides for the granting of victim visas for illegal immigrants brought here for sexual slavery (Farrel 2). While this law was a step in the right direction, it failed to truly slow the problem. In 2009, only 1,300 of the tens of thousands of people smuggled into the United States for sexual slavery received visas under this law (George 563). Another positive aspect provided by the TVPA was the increase in resources to combat sex trafficking. The U.S. Department of Justice created a unit charged with addressing trafficking crimes and also received increased funding (Farrel 2). Even with this increase, the funds spent to address this issue are extremely low and not sufficient to address the problem. According to Karen Stauss, director of programs for Free the Slaves, says, “Only a small portion of the national resources forlaw enforcement is directed at slavery and trafficking in the United States" (Kiener). The reason for such low funding is mainly due to another major problem, the war on drugs. Siddarth Kara, human trafficking expert at Harvard University states that "the federal anti-trafficking budget, about $61 million a year since 2001, is 33 times less than the money the government spends fighting the war on drugs" (Kiener Of course not). it's realistic to expect the same amount of money to be spent on stopping trafficking, but any increase in funding would be a great start. Increasing funding would help make it possible to train law enforcement officers, the people who will be dealing with this problem every day. If trafficking training would be mandatory for officers, it would increase their awareness and hopefully help reduce the problem. It would teach them the signs of sex trafficking and help them assist victims (George 563). Teaching officers to specifically identify trafficking cases and help them provide victims with the right social services would be an essential part of the training (Cross 398). Using a current model of mandatory domestic abuse training as an example, it would be easy to implement this new training (Croce 417). Perhaps the strangest part of the legislature, and the part that causes the most headaches, is that each state has different laws relating to this issue. The Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization, ranks states based on how they address this problem. They rank them from Level 1, which is the best, and Level 4, which is the worst. Surprisingly, there is only one level 4 state, South Dakota. But right next to South Dakota is Minnesota, which is a Tier 1 state, so traffickers are more likely to target South Dakota because there are far fewer laws against trafficking (“Sex Trafficking in the United States” ). If this problem is to be reduced, each state must make an effort to improve its laws because that is where the majority of court cases take place. According to the US Census Bureau, “In 2008, approximately 80,000 criminal cases were filed in U.S. federal courts compared to more than 21 million criminal cases filed in state courts” (Farrel 3). If state legislatures can't handle the situation, perhaps a national law is also needed. The US government needs to crack down harder on prostitution. As previously stated, prostitution fuels modern slavery called sex trafficking. Some argue that legalizing prostitution would help the situation. Cari Mitchell, spokesperson for the English Prostitutes' Collective, says: "Prostitution has been pushed further underground and sex workers have become more vulnerable to abuse and violence, exploitative working conditions, police lawlessness, rape and trafficking". (Kiener). Mitchell believes that prostitutes will be safer, they will be treated better and it will be easier for them to leave. Even if that were the case, the disagreement stems from how different people think about prostitution. Norma Ramos, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, argues that there is no "safer prostitution." People like Ramos believe that prostitution is dehumanizing and turns women into property that can be bought and sold. Ramos says, “The way to address oppression is to end it, not to legalize it, regulate it, or make it more tolerable.” (Kiener). Germany, a country that has legalized it, still struggles to keep it safe and this makes it an increasingly bigger target for traffickers (Kiener)..