Episode Details

Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the various ways children can be trafficked.  They go over the basic terms of what human trafficking is as well as what it looks like when youth are being exploited and how we can better protect youth.

Key Points

• More than 50% of victims globally are children. We need to better understand who those victims are and why they are victims in order to effectuate better prevention strategies.
• A new term, Commercially Sexually Exploited Children, better defines the entirety of the issue. In the past, this has been referred to as “child prostitutes”, but that term implies “I decided to sell myself” when in actuality, vulnerable children are being exploited.
• It’s significant to understand that money doesn’t even have to exchange hands for this to be identified as exploitation. Just the promise to a child of money, goods, or services can define that exploitation as a commercial sex act.
• State to state, the laws vary where children can be arrested for juvenile prostitution and labeled a perpetrator, making it more difficult to rehabilitate children that are victims of commercial sex exploitation.

Resources

• National Human Trafficking Hotline/Resource Center
• Department of Justice
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• The Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act
• Global Trafficking in Person’s Report

[Note from the Ending Human Trafficking podcast team: This episode was recorded in 2011 so the contact information provided is no longer accurate. Please refer endinghumantrafficking.org/contact for the correct contact information to get in touch with the EHT podcast.]

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Transcript

Dave [00:00:00] You are listening to the ending human trafficking podcast. This is episode number three, recorded in May 2011. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:29] And I’m Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:30] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

Sandie [00:00:38] Today, we’re going to look at a review of the basics of what is human trafficking so that we can identify it in our local communities and specifically look at what it looks like when it involves youth who are being sexually exploited.

Dave [00:00:54] And this is a really difficult issue, unfortunately, Sandie, as many of the topics are that we are talking about in this podcast, because, when we talk about children it’s such a complicated issue and it’s such a heartbreaking issue. And yet it is so much a huge part of this issue that it’s something that we really do need to talk about. And you can’t really understand human trafficking if you don’t understand the way that kids play into this.

Sandie [00:01:25] Well, in our Department of Justice statistics, our State Department Global Trafficking in P