When you sell people

When you sell people, you get a bargain. The maintenance is relatively cheap – a human can live and function with remarkably small amounts of cheap food. The product is easily controlled, especially if you own something of theirs. Burning their baby is highly effective, if you let them hear the pitiful screams. 

Consider buying as a later resort. There is a better way. A more cost effective approach to profit: become the boyfriend. It takes almost nothing to persuade a girl you are in love with her. Give her a couple of cheap trinkets, if you must, a few hours of sweet talk, and you become quick boyfriend material. Romance her and push past her sexual boundaries then introduce her to the idea of becoming sexual with a friend.  She will do it for you because you love her. Your machine is now primed for years of production.

I could go on. I will not. 

Money is always at the heart of the human slave trade. People are one of the cheapest commodities and yield the highest profit on the market today. Once procured, the cost to keep a girl functioning is surprisingly cheap and they can produce income for years. The sex market is ravenous – behavioral studies show that the sexual appetite can be stronger than hunger. 

The first step in the process of understanding this global evil is to stop thinking about sex trafficking in terms of sex. Sex happens because sex sells but every moving part in the sex industry machine revolves around the issue of money. That includes the maintenance of an apathetic stupor in affluent cultures so that middle and upper-class citizens are slow to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle to stop the trade. When good folk, law abiding citizens, do nothing, we become part, a key part, of the sex industry channel. Maintenance of our comfortable, protected, pleasant lifestyles is our price and the trafficking industry bets that we will pay it. Our blind eyes are essential for their profit margin.

Prostituting a local girl is a one-man operation: one pimp can sell several girls in-country. Trafficking girls is different. It requires moving the merchandise to various geographical locations, usually across international borders, and that takes an infrastructure. Traffickers are keen business people not uneducated high school drop-outs. This is a multi-million dollar industry that is quickly growing. 

Step one in the chain is transport from her small Eastern European village to the airport. The channel needs somebody to drive a new product to market. The trafficker needs a taxi driver so he finds one simple guy with a family he cannot support and gives him a steady on-call, pay as needed, dependable job. All this guy has to do is what he does anyway: drive a taxi. One insignificantly significant cog in a well-oiled machine. The industry operates exactly that way from farm to sale – individual links on a track that carries human cargo to market.

Our human tendency to equate happiness with a number in our bank account or a certain standard of living creates a perfect market climate where girls, boys, pregnant women, college girls, Roma girls, vulnerable people become merchandise that yield unbelievably lucrative options for keen business people.

When you sell people, you get a bargain.

As we continue this segment on trafficking in the series, A Day in the Life of a Missionary, we must first understand these business principles:

The trafficking of humans for profit is based upon the supposition that a person is a commodity for consumption; like meat, cheese, orange juice, and it needs to get to market. 

The transportation and sales process relies upon individual, relatively isolated links in an industrial chain.

Everybody has a price.