
More than just trafficking for sexual purposes, the issues of human smuggling and human trafficking are many. To better understand the massive size of these markets, we’ll discuss a couple of different aspects.

- The Logistics: Human Trafficking and Human Smuggling are two different activities, that often interleave with each other.
- Human trafficking, is the term most often used to describe people who are recruited and deceived, or forcibly coerced into a life of providing sexual encounters for strangers.
- Human smuggling, is the arrangements made to smuggle people across borders. Usually, it is people seeking a better life, those coming from third-world or developing nations. They are often sold into forced labor to pay the costs of their entrance into a new nation. That entrance requires fake ids, and the transport of these people. Regular, established methods of transporting people across borders is done through networks (organized crime) and includes several things:
- Ways found to bypass normal border checkpoints
- Places that will provide accomodations for the journeys
- Knowing the routes through land, sea & air and how to work around the controls. This often means “having people on the inside,” to make necessary arrangements, rubber-stamp passage through, and more. These people may include boat transporters, guides, airline or airport personnel, and more. These “networks” ARE organized crime rings.
- The people smuggled across borders are often indebted to their smugglers, and forced into labor of one ind or another. That is, so that they may pay the costs of being smuggled.
- Smuggled laborers may have quotas to meet, and penalties for failing to meet them. They may be subjected to inhuman living and working conditions. They may wait weeks, months or even several years for their freedom.
- Those forced into labor through human smuggling, are deceived every bit as much as those who are sold “a new life” and “work” and forced into human trafficking. Those caught in the forced labor rings may work in various aspects of agriculture, the fishing industries, construction, mining, or housekeeping.
- Sometimes, they are forced into committing crimes, with threats of “being exposed” as illegals. This includes thievery, the procurement and selling of illegal drugs, the selling of counterfeit goods and merchandise, begging, and acts of prostitution.
- Victims of either crime are usually very vulnerable people “hoping for a better life.” There is often coerscion laced with many deceptions. Physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuses can scar them for their entire lives. Forced abortions, lack of medical treatment, drugs that are forced upon them, beatings, poor living condtions, poor nutrition and complete lack of freedom are some of the many things they suffer from and endure.
- Often, pictures are taken of those being trafficked, in compromising situations. It makes them “beholden” to their captives and under their control. Their flight and fight for freedoms, ends up in terrible suffering, pain and strife, and sometimes death.
- These are no small issues. The traffickers encompass the globe with familiarity of the governments and laws, the transportation systems, the transportation modes and hubs and more. There are global crime rings still being discovered.
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