When is the last time you heard the news talk about male human trafficking victims? In most cases – the answer to the question is “never”.
While male human trafficking cases are rarely heard about, the instances of such a tragic crime are extremely high. In some cases, male victims even outnumber female victims. The silence on this subcategory of human trafficking is damning to victims that are in desperate need of our attention. Instead, they get our silence.
The news is not the only entity to blame. Human trafficking is even legally categorized in relation to legislature aimed to prevent violence against women. The legislature mentions women and children specifically numerous times, with little to no mention of male victims at all. The International Labour Organization estimates that 98% of survivors of commercial sex exploitation (meaning – people who are forced into sex work, often related to trafficking) are women. However, human trafficking is not limited to sex work, contrary to popular belief.
Men are often trafficked for the purpose of state-imposed labor, a crime that is more rampant than sex trafficking, of which 2% of such survivors are male. Men are also very frequently forced into a type of slavery called “debt bondage”, of which 19.6 million men are forced into in countries like India, China and Pakistan, as well as millions more in other nations. These men are forced into dangerous hard labor for an endless period of time. As they work, the debt increases making it impossible for one to ever pay it off. A huge number of debt bondage slaves die before ever seeing freedom, many of which are debt bonded from a very young age due to their parents’ debts.
The presence of men being trafficked is alarming with nearly 400,000 men and boys being victimized into this unfortunate situation. These numbers are so high that it’s astonishing how we’re able to turn a blind eye. So, why have we? While there’s no definitive answer to this question, it’s thought that the answer might be something along the lines of the world only caring about what it deems as the “weaker sex”, the women that we all need to “save”. It’s great that more people are turning their attention to the horrors of human trafficking and are learning to recognize it so that it can be stopped, but if we’re searching for only women’s faces in the crowds, we’re seriously letting down millions of men and likely sealing their fate.
Human trafficking agencies and warriors tout that, “one victim is too many”. If this is genuinely true, then we need to be turning our eyes to a broader picture of human trafficking and the victims that it encompasses. Male trafficking, including male sex trafficking, has been grossly ignored for too long. It’s time to correct the world’s ignorance and help all human trafficking victims. We cannot be silent anymore.
