SGBV

Rama was looking for a better life. A young woman in war-torn Syria, Rama was working in a café when a man offered her a restaurant job in Lebanon with a much higher salary. She jumped at the opportunity, but instead of taking her to the well-paying job he had promised, the man took Rama to a run-down brothel in a slum. Over the next nine months, she was beaten and forced into prostitution, one of as many as 75 women caught up in one of Lebanon’s largest sex-trafficking rings. As Rama told a reporter, “We slept where we worked ... The windows were painted black. We couldn’t see the light or breathe the air outside.”

Describing her captor, the ringleader of the trafficking operation, she said, “It’s not that he made us feel like slaves. We were actual slaves ... He beat me until I surrendered”.

Rama eventually escaped that horror, but she is physically and emotionally shattered. And Rama is not alone. Sadly, her experience is far more common than most of us realize. An estimated 21 million people in more than 106 countries, including countless children, have been reported trapped in modern slavery. That is more than the population of Romania. Those are people living in some of the most horrifying conditions imaginable. We see children forced to make bricks in Peru, or disentangle fishing nets in Ghana, or who are sold into prostitution in South- East Asia. We see men held captive on fishing boats off the coast of Thailand, and women trapped as domestic workers in the Persian Gulf. No country is immune to this crisis, and that includes the United States, where, despite our efforts to combat human trafficking, too many people are still falling victim to criminals who force them into prostitution or other types of work, with no pay and no way out.