Rachel Lloyd writes from personal experience about human trafficking in her 2011 book “Girls Like Us”

Rachel Lloyd’s 2011 book is appropriately titled because almost anyone can be lured into this awful underworld of modern day slavery. Most are teen and preteen girls with the median age of about 13. Skilled traffickers manipulate and control them into submission with a divide-and-conquer tactic. They sometimes lure them with the smallest of bribes such as a couple dollars worth of junk food.

Lloyd began working in the sex industry when she was a teenager to survive.

 “Every teenage girl on the subway is a victim, or at least a potential victim,” Lloyd writes. “Every man, particularly middle-age white men, the ones I most closely associated with johns, is a predator.”

I know a little bit about human trafficking, domestic violence and other related social issues. I decided to read more about it because Wichita State’s Center for Combatting Human Trafficking is hosting a series of events next week on a variety of topics surrounding human trafficking.  

The book helped me learn more about trafficking by taking me through Lloyd’s experiences with abuse and meeting the different societal roles in human trafficking: recruitment, the police, why victims stay, the relapses they have and how they leave this billion dollar-plus industry.

Lloyd also does a good job of recounting her and others’ experiences with human trafficking. I knew it was bad, but I never had it described to me in such detail or heard descriptions of the psychological results.

The effects of Human Trafficking trauma is compared with prisoners of war, hostages, domestic violence, sexual abuse and even soldiers’ post-traumatic stress syndrome. Lloyd writes about the beatings and close brushes with death she endured from the hands of her abuser. She tried to commit suicide.

I would have liked to know more about the legal aspects of trafficking. Words can be powerful. The word “prostitute” is different than “trafficked” and can change one’s perception about the person involved. It can also change her treatment in the legal system from being charged with a crime to needing services because of her exploitation.

A chapter about how people not associated with trafficking, prostitution or pimps contribute, often unknowingly, to attitudes and behaviors that stand against this illegal activity would have made the book better as well.

Estimates are that 200,000 to 300,000 adolescents are sexually exploited every year in the United States, according to a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study. A study in New York City found that 75 percent of the adolescent victims of human trafficking were in the foster care system. That tells me we need to be more informed about human trafficking.

You can learn more about what Lloyd is doing about trafficking by going to the Web site of her non-profit organization at www.gems-girls.org. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline is 1-888-3737-888.