In McLennan County, TX, population 250,000, their sheriff’s department is all hands on deck to end human trafficking. Over the weekend – their patrol guys detected 3 separate human trafficking situations that could easily have been overlooked or ignored – and when they notified their human trafficking department – the lead detective showed up for them and the victims.
The proposed Domestic Workers Bill of RIghts could codify workplace protections and standards that women of color in the industry have spent years organizing around; with the potential to impact 2.5 million domestic workers, including nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers.
The only difference between R. Kelly’s behavior and classic pimp controller trafficking into commercial sex is that R. Kelly kept the women and girls to himself – making this “personal sexual servitude”, and not “pimp-controlled sex trafficking”. Regardless of the type of trafficking, we need to be calling it what it is and holding perpetrators like R. Kelly accountable.
Complex trauma and traumatic childhood experiences are vulnerabilities that traffickers deliberately prey upon when identifying and recruiting their victims. Epstein’s predatory behavior is just like every other trafficker – this is just the tip of the iceberg.
While this article is an in-depth study on the labor trafficking across agricultural fields in Italy, the survivor accounts and experiences, and the traffickers’ behavior, are identical to the reality in every nation that relies on agriculture as part of their economy.
