Each year on January 11, Human Trafficking Awareness Day is recognized across the U.S. This year, we should examine what we are actually building awareness of.

As a child trafficking survivor who has also worked for anti-trafficking nonprofits and shelters, I have watched disinformation about human trafficking spread across social media, proliferated by grifter groups like QAnon, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), and Exodus Cry who capitalize on survivors’ trauma. If we actually want to prevent human trafficking, we must recognize that trafficking is exploitation that thrives on vulnerability.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) defines human trafficking as the force, fraud, or coercion of a person for the commercial benefit of a perpetrator. It is exploitation of vulnerable people, usually by a person who is familiar to the victim, such as a boyfriend, girlfriend, or family member. In campaigns to build awareness, sex trafficking is often sensationalized — and protecting vulnerable people from labor trafficking is equally important, though rarely receives the same level of attention.

As The Washington Post’s Jessica Contrera reported on the debunked Wayfair conspiracy, QAnon’s influence has grown an online mob that harms the people they claim to care about by tying up the precious few resources available to real trafficking victims and social workers. Disinformation has also contributed to the racist targeting of biracial families. An example of this occurred when Cindy McCain reported a biracial family for trafficking their child at an airport in 2019. McCain said she saw “[…] a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me.” Police interrogated the family who were not trafficking their child.

Other persistently harmful stereotypes are that traffickers are not wealthy, white or respected members of the community. But like child molesters, human traffickers often hide in plain sight, systematically grooming and isolating victims. Recent high profile examples of this include R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Victims’ stories in these cases illustrate how we can’t punish or incarcerate our way out of human trafficking. Instead, we must address the underlying causes of precarity.

Among the strangest trafficking falsehoods proliferated on social media (for which no actual trafficking or kidnapping appears to have occurred) are myths that traffickers place unusual items on parked cars to mark prospective victims with cheese slices, zip ties, or in one case, roses left on windshields in a Walmart parking lot. The flowers turned out to be a gift from a woman who didn’t want to waste the bouquet she had received, and thought it would be a kind gesture to share the blossoms. Even more legitimate anti-trafficking nonprofits have contributed to the fear-mongering using sensationalized imagery such as children behind bars, airport signs that describe every anxious traveller as a potential trafficking victim, racist assertions, and problematic terms like rescue, save, or modern day slavery.

In the case of child trafficking victims, their perpetrators are most often their own abusive parents, relatives, or a family friend. Statistically, people who are impoverished, domestic violence victims, in foster care, homeless, Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrants, LGBTQ2IA, or have a criminal record, are disproportionately more susceptible to traffickers. Rarely a stranger lurking in the shadows, a trafficker is more likely to be the one person who is kind to you when you’re homeless.

Inhumane immigration policies also create precarity, making people prone to exploitation. For example, the wait time for T visas for trafficking survivors is three years in most states. And children forcibly separated from their parents and locked in cells by ICE and Homeland Security are experiencing state-sanctioned trafficking and torture right now. Yet nowhere in the State Department’s 2021 Trafficking in Persons report does the U.S. government acknowledge its own role in state-sponsored human trafficking, nor how the 13th amendment makes an exception for slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons.

After Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, most people are aware of human trafficking. But few understand how difficult it is to trust police or find a qualified lawyer when you are a trafficking survivor without money or power. Oftentimes, trafficking victims end up incarcerated themselves for self defense, as Cyntoia Brown endured.

We could eradicate human trafficking if we decreased the vulnerabilities that lead to exploitation. Police receive funding for expensive weapons and equipment, but there is little assistance or safe housing available for victims in the aftermath. The anti-trafficking industrial complex is a lucrative philanthropy for everyone except victims.

For example, Polaris receives federal funding to manage the National Human Trafficking Hotline, but most survivors I know who have called to ask for help are offered nothing other than a suggestion to call the police. In 2019, Polaris reported a revenue of nearly $15 million dollars. If the National Human Trafficking Hotline is just going to tell people to call the police, it’s a much shorter number to dial 9–1–1 than their long toll-free number.

Solutions to human trafficking are not men jumping out of helicopters or invasive facial recognition software. Humans’ basic needs are not that complicated. Effective solutions are permanent supportive housing, legal aid, equitable access to higher education, immigration reform, foster care reform, healthcare for all, and encouraging representatives to expand the Victims’ Rights Act. Housing alone would significantly reduce human trafficking and exploitation.

If we actually want to end human trafficking, we must eliminate sources of vulnerability.

Sabra Boyd: A Workaholic in Progress

January 11 is Human Trafficking Awareness…