CBA Record

YLS Special Issue l PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN

By Oliver Khan

If You See Something, Say Something 1-888-373-7888

A person stands at the heart of every story of human trafficking. A person who, through coercion and violence, is forced into prostitution or slave labor. Each individual’s story is one of heartbreak, desperation, and abuse. On January 23, as part of Human Trafficking Awareness Week, the Young Lawyers’ Section of the CBA held a seminar entitled Every Person has a Voice: Exposing, Examining, and Eradicating Human Traf- ficking. Speakers included Donna Fishman of the Jewish Coalition Against Sex Traf- ficking Chicago, Kaethe Morris Hoffer of Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploita- tion (CAASE), Professor Jody Raphael of

DePaul University College of Law, Detec- tive Al Krok formerly of the Chicago Police Department, Judge Virginia M. Kendall of the Northern District of Illinois, and T. Markus Funk of Perkins Coie LLP. More than 170 individuals registered for the seminar. Understanding Trafficking Most human trafficking takes place in the darkest corners of our society. So statistics regarding the number of victims are very difficult to come by. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center, whose hot- line number is in the title of this article, reports that it received over 9,000 reports

of human trafficking between 2007 and 2012. Human Trafficking Trends in the United States (Nov. 2013) http://bit. ly/2kxVJq3. Twenty-nine percent of those cases involved children, and of those cases, 74% involved in sex trafficking. These numbers likely represent only the tip of the iceberg. Globally, there are an estimated 21,000,000 victims of human trafficking. Human Trafficking by the Numbers (Jan. 2016), http://bit.ly/2jHAcLW; see List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, U.S. Department of Labor, http://bit.ly/1RXGSd5. In Chicago alone, between 16,000 to 25,000 women and girls are trafficked for sex everyday.

38 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2017