© Larry FinkA photographer's representation of a typical scene at one of the motels in Central Connecticut used for sex trafficking.
From the
World Economic Forum to the approaching
Super Bowl to the current advocacy month, awareness surrounding human trafficking is swelling.
To coincide with National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, which lasts through January, UNICEF has tackled the subject with a dynamic infographic. And it paints a pretty grim picture.
The graphic reveals that 21 million people are victims of forced labor and other forms of exploitation each year.
"The issue with slavery is that it is everywhere,"
Andrew Forrest, chairman and founder of Fortescue Metals Group, told HuffPost Live on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Sadly, the most disturbing revelation from the infographic might be that there's a surprising lack of accountability and prosecution for those who perpetrate it.
In 2012, there were only 4,746 trafficking convictions
worldwide. This number seems even more alarming when considering that of the estimated 21 million individuals currently being trafficked, 5.5 million of them are children.
In an op-ed for the
Guardian on Monday, Ivy Suriyopas, the director of the Anti-Trafficking Initiative at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, writes that
too many laws criminalize victims instead of holding the traffickers themselves accountable.
Comment: This doesn't just "work against a free market" - it completely contradicts the economic diktats the U.S. has imposed on the rest of the world for the last 50-some years!