Child Sex Trafficking & The Alarming Number of Missing Women
They Both Deserve Much More Attention
According to the National Crime Information Center, In 2020, 268,884 women were reported missing. Of that number nearly 100,000 of them were Black American women.
In 2021, according to the same source, over 500,000 people went missing. Of that number, over half of that number are people under the age of 21.
On average, 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked in the US every year, and 1 out of 7 of those are children. The US is also the #1 destination for globally trafficked children which number anywhere between 600,000 and 800,000; the majority of whom are trafficked for sexual exploitation.
What is my point in all of this?
There is a very unfortunate and unnecessary debate amongst what Dr. Martin Luther King described as “color consumed” that one tragic exploitation is more important than the other; or that because one does not seem to get as much attention, nothing else matters. The argument usually says that having apathy, or a downright aversion to learning about child sex trafficking is justified because no one talks about how many Black women go missing each year in America.
It is a false dichotomy, and also isn’t true.
None of this gets nearly enough airtime. And the movie that just came out to highlight the child trafficking aspect has been attacked, lied on, demonized, and minimized by the same gatekeepers of information that under report on missing women in the US. In fact, it seems as though the only time Black women missing are reported is when the motivation is to stoke racial flames rather than correct an injustice. In other words, any reporting on it seems to be more for clicks than for justice.
Let’s not get caught up in this false divide that is being presented to us. If the same publications not reporting on missing Black women are also not reporting on the multi-billion dollar child sex trafficking industry, maybe there is a link. If the same people silent about the 100,000 Black women that go missing every year also bad-mouthed and ridiculed the movie Sound of Freedom, which really was squarely about child sex trafficking, maybe there’s a broader agenda. Maybe race isn’t the focal point, but something else entirely.
The moment we can realize this, come together, and fight this evil as one unit is the moment things will drastically shift for the better.