Recently Dr. Laura Lederer, former senior advisor to the State Department of Trafficking in Persons, spoke at a Tulsa area church where she told the story of Rosa: America's wake up call to the human trafficking problem here in the United States. (Read the full story in our Recent Articles section.) Dr. Lederer said, "The Department of Justice is still collecting data concerning this problem and reports are inconclusive. For example, in Rosa's case, officials rescued 40 young women. By the time of the trial, only 14 girls testified. A couple girls returned to Mexico; others simply disappeared. One of the young women who did testify told us this trafficking ring had been operating for years and had victimized hundreds of women. Because we've only been tracking and prosecuting trafficking cases since 2000, and because convincing victims to testify is difficult, it's a challenge to get a true sense of the numbers of people impacted. That said, we know trafficking is widespread; the Justice Department's head of the new human trafficking unit told me they have a case of trafficking in every state of the country now."

According to author/journalist Victor Malarek (presented on Nightline) we are in our forth wave of women and children sex trafficking victims being shipped into the US.
1. The first wave took place in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Asian women from Thailand and the Philippines;
2. The second wave took place in the early 1980s and was composed mainly of African women from Ghana and Nigeria;
3. The third wave happened in the mid-to-late 1980s and was composed mainly of women from Latin America, such as Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic;
4. The fourth and current wave is composed of women from Central and Eastern Europe. Under full conditions of globalization, this fourth wage occurs at a speed and in proportion never seen before: every year, approximately 175,000 women from the former Soviet republics are trafficked into the sex trade. Ten years ago, the fourth wave had barely started. Today, these women constitute 25% of the global sex trade. Of course, this entire industry is under the control of various organized crime syndicates collaborating with each other, making the sex trade a truly global venture whereby women from peripheral areas are trafficked through transnational criminal networks and end up as prostitutes in core countries.

To read more go to our Recent Articles section: Interview with Victor Malarek

A University of Pennsylvania report on Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in America notes:
- Over 1 million children are currently involved in sex trafficking in US
- Half the children in America involved in sex trafficking are African-American (US born citizens)
- Poverty is the main driving issue, but many also come from middle-class families
- Child sexual abuse is currently the least frequently reported abuse in America
- 47% of child sexual abuse confirmed cases were committed by a family member, 49% by a friend of family, only 4% committed by a stranger
- 1/2 of all reported sex abuse cases are of children 12 or younger, 1/3 of all rape cases
- Greatest age of risk for females is 14, drops to half the peak at age 17, and 1/5 the peak by age 27
- Over half of those rescued from sex trafficking admit to being physically or sexually abused before leaving home
- Most runaways are female, between the ages of 11-17 years old
- Traffickers use other children already involved to invite and trap victims
See the full report on our Recent Articles Link section

A recent report conducted by "The Sex Workers Project," given the title "Kicking Down The Door," discusses the many traumatic issues involved when vice raids are used to reach and help the victims of human trafficking. The study interviewing 46 people comes to some eye-opening problems associated with this approach. Read the summary article listed in our Recent Articles section and make your comments on what we in Oklahoma can do as a coalition to help improve the aid to victims.

More than 1200 Incidents of Human Trafficking reported in US: Between January 2007 and September 2008, there were 1,229 alleged incidents of human trafficking in the United States, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The bureau says that 83 percent of the incidents involved sex trafficking, 32 percent involved sex trafficking of children, and 12 percent involved labor trafficking. Women were most likely to be victims, accounting for 90 percent of all trafficking victims and 99 percent of those involved in sex trafficking. 63 percent of sex trafficking victims were US citizens, with Hispanics and Asians the next most affected, with Hispanics making up 37 percent of the alleged sex trafficking victims and 56 percent of labor victims. Perpetrators were overwhelming male, making up nearly 8 in 10 of the suspects.