Indigenous Girls and Women Are the Most Vulnerable to Sex Trafficking

The violations began with Christopher Columbus and follow through to President Trump’s immigration crackdowns

An Indigenous mother with her three children. Photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post/Getty Images

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

One place this is occurring is at our southern border. Curiously, the Trump administration has used human trafficking as a reason to build a wall and crack down on immigration there, but experts maintain that the changes being made are putting even more migrant families, many of whom are Indigenous from Central America, in greater danger. Migrants who seek asylum legally are now being forced to wait in Mexico until their cases are heard, where they’re considered vulnerable targets and law enforcement is lax.

Human trafficking continues to grow and proliferate because it’s big business. Traffickers make about $150 billion a year from enslaved laborers. The bulk of those profits, 66%, come from sex trafficking.

At detention centers, sexual exploitation has become rampant. Between 2012 and 2018, there were 1,448 allegations of sexual abuse filed with ICE and there were 237 allegations of sexual abuse in their facilities in 2017 alone. This atmosphere, and the fact that children are being intentionally separated from their families, increases the likelihood that those same children will fall prey to human traffickers, and sex traffickers in particular.

The stories of sex trafficking occurring in Mexico, where asylum-seeking families are being forced to wait, are harrowing. One young Indigenous woman reported being raped 43,200 times between the ages of 12–16 while she was being trafficked.

It’s a global problem. The International Labour Organization estimates that about 40.3 million people have fallen victim to it. Of individuals who are being trafficked, 75% are female, and at least 25% are children.

Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain labor or commercial sex acts.

North of the border in Canada, Indigenous people are only 4% of the population, but make up more than 50% of sex trafficking victims.

In the Americas, the human trafficking of Indigenous peoples began with Christopher Columbus. To this day, Indigenous people in the Americas, and women and children especially, are being disproportionately affected by human trafficking and primarily, sex trafficking.

North of the border in Canada, Indigenous people are only 4% of the population but make up more than 50% of sex trafficking victims. A survivor of sex trafficking stated that Indigenous girls are pursued more than others, and that she often hid her Native identity while she was in captivity because Indigenous girls were subjected to the worst treatment and violence.

Sex trafficking in Canada has been directly linked to the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). So much so that the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) includes calls to action on it.

In America, human trafficking wasn’t illegal until 2000—and while it’s called the “Land of the Free,” the United States is ranked among the worst in this regard, with hundreds of thousands of workers enslaved.

Indigenous women in the United States are also subjected to higher rates of sex trafficking.

In Hennepin County, Minnesota, Native women are only 2.2% of the whole population, but makeup 25% of women arrested for prostitution. In Anchorage, Alaska, Alaskan Natives are only 7.9% of the population, but 33% of those arrested for selling their bodies. Some prostitutes perform sex work independently, but at least half meet the definition of being trafficked.