Week One: Intro. and Numbers

To read the introductory post to this series, please click here.

Here's the thing about deciding to do something like take a week to pray for the issue of human trafficking: I like to pray intelligently, and to do I have to do some research, which means I have to read about the issue, which means I'm subjecting myself to learning about the realities of things I'd much rather pretend don't happen. But they do, and so I've been trying to pull together some basic introductory stuff today so I can pray.

The United Nations defines human trafficking as the "recuitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abductio, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation." (http://www.ungift.org/)

Here are the three statistics that I found today that shocked me the most:

• 2.45 million people are estimated to be in conditions of forced labor as a result of trafficking.
• 18% of trafficked persons have at least a middle-level education.
• About 66% of all humans trafficked are women; however, 46 countries reported that women play a key role as perpetrators of human trafficking!

Some helpful links:
http://www.ungift.org/
http://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/Executive_summary_english.pdf
http://www.humantrafficking.org/links/95

I will make some comments about this during the week, but for today, I just want to let these sites and numbers speak for themselves.