Modern Human Trafficking
- Randy Overbeck
- 27 minutes ago
- 3 min read
“There are more people in slavery now than at any time in human history.”
At my latest visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, I was chilled by what I learned about the history of slavery in this country. The curated exhibits with the actual shackles, the cramped slave pen where 12 bodies struggled to find space on the floor and the detailed blueprint of a slave ship complete with an illustration of slaves shoved together in the hull—all was new knowledge to me. I’d never been taught any of this history in school and, what’s more important, I never included these lessons in my work as educator. I was left stunned and sickened, but enlightened.
But the museum is not merely about the history of slavery and oppression in the US. One permanent exhibit, “Invisible: Slavery Today, ” delivered some of the most shocking revelations. The statement at the top of this post was emblazoned across one room of the exhibit. I read and re-read the sentence, standing in the middle of the room, asking how can this be?
I learned the statement was no exaggeration.
The exhibit provided plenty of research and documentation of the child slavery, sex trafficking and forced domestic servitude, as well as other forms of slavery . It also gave numerous examples of this enslavement still going on in the U. S. and the rest of the world. The latest statistics put more than 27 million people in some kind of enslavement, fueling an staggering $172 billion industry annually in the sex trafficking business alone.
I was so stunned by what I learned I wondered why so little attention was paid to this ugly and widespread cancer in society. Once the media has moved past celebrity scandals like the Jeffry Epstein trafficking network, little attention is paid to this issue. January is NATIONAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING PREVENTION month and I wanted to use my blog to shine a little light—feeble though it may be—on this national and international disgrace.
I was so outraged by this inhumanity I decided to center two of my recent novels around the issue of human trafficking. Crimson at Cape May, the second entry in my award-winning Haunted Shores Mysteries, is a murder mystery involving a successful shipping company which also had a very profitable revenue stream transporting people. This novel is a #2 bestseller on Amazon and B & N and I’m gratified
that thousands of my readers have discovered at least one story confronting this national disgrace.
My new novel in the series, Red Shadows at Saugatuck, examines this problem through a different lens. In my story, the victim is a Native American teen, first missing, then murdered. As my hero Darrell learns, the murdered girl is just one of the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) who have disappeared. In fact, ten times as many Native American females have gone missing as white women in America. And it turns out human trafficking is only one part of this MMIW injustice. Though the tale is pure fiction, it captures the very cruel reality of Native women and girls.
Both novels are cold case murder mysteries entangled in a ghost story that readers have called “haunting, fast-paced whodunits,” “rollickingly good” and “a page turner.” Hardly treatises on the ugly world of human slavery. But both give readers a glimpse into the ugly reality of this national and international scourge.
For more information on human trafficking, you can check out these links.
If you haven’t checked out my stories focusing on human trafficking, click here. https://www.authorrandyoverbeck.com/books
Either way, take time to educate yourself on this pervasive problem. In the time you read this post, ten more children were sucked into trafficking network. That’s right. Ten children.