July 28, 2022
Press Statement by Donna Rice Hughes on World Day Against Trafficking
Statement by Enough Is Enough® CEO & President Donna Rice Hughes on the 2022 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons
This July 30th, Enough Is Enough® joins thousands of organizations around the globe in recognizing World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. Human trafficking is a heinous crime impacting millions of victims annually. The sex and labor trafficking industry is second only to drug trafficking as the world’s largest criminal industry.
Enough Is Enough®, whose mission since 1994 has been to prevent the internet-enabled exploitation of children, knows all too well about this year’s theme, “Use and Abuse of Technology,” as technology is used and abused to perpetuate predatory actions by traffickers, child predators and other opportunist criminals.
The internet is the most dominant business model sex traffickers used to solicit buyers of commercial sex (85 % of new cases filed). Since 2000, traffickers have recruited 55% of sex trafficking victims through social media platforms, web-based messaging apps and online chat rooms, among others. (2021 Federal Human Trafficking Report)
While progress has been made to curb internet-enabled sex trafficking, Enough Is Enough® recognizes that current efforts to combat human trafficking need to go beyond traditional approaches. We must begin to look at root causes that fuel the demand for sex trafficking and child exploitation – namely child sexual abuse material (child pornography) and hardcore pornography.
Today's online pornography, most of which is prosecutable under U.S. federal obscenity laws, depicts themes of brutal torture, incest, choking, eroticized racism and teen rape. Eighty-eight percent of pornography scenes depict violence against females, including trafficked girls and women.
A cycle of abuse is driven by the consumer's appetite for more extreme and deviant types of content, which fuels the desire to act out those fantasies on innocent children and vulnerable women, driving the demand for these victims to be sold commercially for sex. In turn, trafficked victims are further abused when the sex crimes against them are turned into pictures and videos, continuing the cycle.
Without the aggressive prosecution and funding of obscenity laws, which fuel the pandemic of sex trafficking and child pornography (which depicts violent sex acts against children as young as infants and toddlers), law enforcement will not be able to truly turn back the tide of internet-enabled sexual exploitation.
Enough Is Enough® continues to work alongside the legal community and technology industry to stay ahead of traffickers, predators and other criminals who use and abuse technology.