United States' Online Slave Sales

I'm young and I'm a woman. My country is ranked first in the world for sexual violence. As many as 67 out of every 100 women aged 15 have experienced it. We are on the list of countries with more feminicides, with seven women murdered every day. And we are number six worldwide for rape, with one happening every four minutes. In Mexico City around 450,000 women and girls are exploited for prostitution, or one in 20, with the average capture age being 12. That’s one of the reasons why this story affects me so personally.

At a very young age I learned that our bodies are the property of a men, which gave them the right to beat us, touch us, rape us and kill us. It was until not so long ago that I learned it was not supposed to be that way.

This article talks about the famous website Backpage.com, which, since 2010, has been facing law suits due to its connections to sex trafficking and the prostitution of minors. On the site you can buy everything from used furniture to clothes, to young girls who have been beaten, burned, threatened, drugged, raped and forced into prostitution. Despite this, the multiple suits have not been able to proceed and Backpage continues running.

A man who walks into a brothel run by a woman in which girls in appearance seem joyful and healthy, or who purchases the services of a prostitute on the street, will never guess what’s going on behind the scenes. 

There’s an estimated 27 million people in slavery globally, That's more than the entire populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Dallas combined. There are 300,000 in the US and 1,243,400 in the red districts of Europe. An approximate 80% of them are women and 50% are under age, usually starting at the age of 13. This for a business that generates $32 billion every year and is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. As much as 20% of all internet pornography involves these victims. Only 1% of them are rescued. 

If we thought slavery was a thing of the past, we haven’t been paying attention. I just wish we would stop reading statistics and start changing them.