Over 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked each year, and of those numbers, 70% are women and 50% of them are children.

Leslie Rye, a 30 year old, had gone through the horrific experience of being a victim to human trafficking. She grew up with a single parent in an abusive environment which allowed her emancipation at the age of 15. At the age of 17, she became an exotic dancer in order to provide for herself. Due to this she did not have a stable safe life with no means of transportation which made her an even easier target. She was abducted and brought to a hotel where she was beaten and raped before being dumped into a trunk and transported elsewhere where she was stripped of everything and locked in a room.

She was in that room with 10 to 15 more girls for three months of emotional, physical, and psychological abuse before she was rescued in a sting operation. Even after her rescue she grappled with lack of self worth and was ashamed of herself. On top of that, women of color are more likely to be trafficked at a young age due to the misconception of how people of color are viewed. According to the studies that The Center on Poverty and Inequality conducted, “women of colored are viewed as in need of less nurturing, less protection, less support, less comfort, more independent than their white counterparts.”

Has anyone watched the most recent Marvel movie ‘Black Widow’? The fictional character of the movie, Natasha Romanoff returns to confront the darker parts of her past. As children, Natasha Romanoff and her sister Yelena Belova, were human trafficked and placed into a program called the Red Room which was a Soviet-Russian secret program led by Dreykov. There, they trained young girls to be elite spies and assassins against their will through years of psychological conditioning and later mind control through chemical subjugation.

In the movie, the three minute opening sheds light on the subject of human trafficking and brought awareness. Yelena says, “Dreykov and his network of Widows. He takes more every day. Children who don’t have anyone to protect them. Just like us when we were small. Maybe one in twenty survives the training, becomes a Widow. The rest, he kills. To him, we are just things. Weapons with no face that he can just throw away.”

Although the movie is fictional, the issue that the movie portrayed on human trafficking is very real one. The FBI describes human trafficking as “a crime that hides in plain sight.” They have also released the following warning signs of human trafficking: 

• Victims that work in the same place they live.
• Poor living conditions.
• They let someone else speak for them.
• They are not in possession of their own travel or immigration documents.
• There are locks on the outside of doors where they live.
• They are constantly watched and guarded by someone.
• They pay their boss for food, clothing and rent.
• They are lied to about the work they are to perform.
• Victims are subjected to debt bondage in which traffickers demand labor to repay debt.

Human trafficking is a crime against humanity, where humanity itself is at stake here.