Slavery has been illegal for a very long time throughout the United States of America, but this does not mean that people aren’t getting enslaved in spite of the laws that have been created to combat it. You might wonder how slavery could still be possible in our modern day and age, but the fact of the matter is that it actually isn’t that surprising when you consider how prevalent human trafficking is.
Human trafficking is essentially when someone is kidnapped and taken to a different location where they are used for a variety of different reasons. It is an enormous societal ill and causes an enormous amount of human suffering, which is why there are a lot of strict laws against it. The most common thing that happens when human trafficking is done is that the people that get kidnapped end up getting sold into sex slavery. They are forced into prostitution and the like, and the underground market for sex slaves exists all across the country.
Many of the human trafficking laws in Virginia come from preventing forcible abduction of individuals, but because of the fact that a lot of human trafficking is a sex crime in nature at least in some ways it is important to remember that the law has a lot more clauses than you would expect a simple anti kidnapping law to have. It incorporates aspect of rape as well violence since these are two pretty much thoroughly entangled aspects of this practice.
There are two ways in which human trafficking is even more horrifying than you might think it to be. To start off with, there is the fact that a lot of the people that suffer due to human trafficking come from abroad, from countries that don’t have a lot of laws against the trafficking of human beings. This makes it easier for the people that are profiting from this practice to do what they want to without having to worry about legal ramifications. This is why an important part of the law is that the victims don’t have to be US citizens in order for what happened to them to be a crime.
The second way in which human trafficking can be particularly dangerous is when it comes to kids. Children are often much easier to kidnap than adults simply because of the fact that they are more gullible and are not physically strong enough to fend for themselves. In these cases children are abducted and then bred for the purposes of sexual exploitation. This is a highly disgusting practice that damages society in severe ways, so the legal systems put in place to prevent it from happening have taken into account the fact that a lot of the victims of human trafficking are going to be children which is why the laws put in place are so strict and mandate such severe penalties for people that are convicted of these crimes.