Kylia McCoy

Professor Allison Fernley

Introduction to Writing 1010

9 October 2017

Human Trafficking in the United States: A Modern Day Slavery

In early 2013, a shocking story hit the American Media; a common practice among

impoverished families was to sell their children into indentured servitude. Vietnamese and

Korean woman and children (predominantly preteen girls) have been brought into Cambodia as

slaves. These girls are forced into hard labor or sex slavery to pay back debts, to pay for the

familys needs or for their own necessities. Girls as young as eight, must work off their family's

debt or work indefinitely for these owners. Many who must work off their parents debt accure

a debt of their own at a faster rate than they can pay it off. The owners charge them for their

own expenses like daily meals, drinks/water, travel expenses and medical care.

This modern day slavery caused an uproar in the United States. Other than the moral

issues we had for it, is also solidified a growing issue stateside. Many Americans were going

through similar situations. The people of our own country, are forced into prostitution by their

economic status or by an authority figure in their life. Unhealthy and abusive relationships can

include an induction into prostitution, their partner (or pimp) forces them into this by means of

threats generally. In other cases, a woman may choose to enter that field, but if she wants out or

changes her mind a pimp will threaten her and/or her family. Pimps who happen to have a higher

status in their day jobs may even threaten to tell someone about the prostitute.
There are even cases of cops acting as pimps to prostitutes, and using their authority over them to

control the women. Brian Bunton, a Oakland Police Officer is one instance of this. Bunton acted

as the pimp to a young woman, who at the time was a minor. (U.S. News) Although this is a

current case, being only a few months old, it reflects the same issues that were surfacing again in

2013.

Many journalists took this unfortunate opportunity to expose the unknown sex trafficking

and sex slavery in the U.S. Including the journalist known as Seraaj with the Orlando Advocate.

Seraaj wrote an article in 2013 pertaining to this topic, and another on 30 November, 2015. In

2015 the issue started to become forgotten again, many journalists wrote updates to try and

combat this. In Seraajs 2015 article, entitled Human Trafficking and its Impact on the Black

Community, he expresses the disturbing statistics and stories of African-Americans being

trafficked in Orlando, Florida. His article begins by explaining the problem nationally and at the

local scale, he also gives some first hand accounts of peoples experiences being abducted and/or

forced into the work. The majority of the article is about one womans experience being a

trafficked in Orlando, and how people can help to fix or minimize the issue in Orlando. Much of

the article is also dedicated to taking the blame off these prostitutes. He writes about how they

are being forced into the work by means of threats. The majority of his writing on this article is

very professional and non emotion, it is reportative writing at its core. Although you can see the

emotion come through toward the end, when he discusses the womens stories and how to help

them.
 Seraajs article is primarily rooted in pathos, although there is a good amount of factual

and statistical data to encase the stories and roots of the paper. The author uses stories from those

who have been trafficked, and those who traffick, as the main points and builds rest of the paper

around it. I have noticed that there is little ethos or personal connection to the topic. Seraaj

doesnt appear to have any type of credentials to back up these claims, besides the statistics hes

gathered from other sources. While the use of these womens stories is an amazing way to show

what it is actually like for the women involved, it does little to back up and support the larger

issue for Orlando. The pathos he uses within the stories causes an emotional reaction for that

woman, but is not as persuasive for the larger picture, of the many thousand women in danger

and those who will be. In fact, he uses more statistics to back up the top issues for African-

Americans than he does to solidify the alarming rate of women endangered.

Seraaj is only somewhat effective in arguing the difficulty and damage of this issue,

because he relies too heavily on the stories and less related information, substanance and

statistics. The primary concern of this essay is about the danger these women are in, though on

third page, he dedicated nearly a half of the page to information regarding the social issues for

African-Americans. While there is a place for that in the paper, it was a rather large section for

something that shouldve been a small note. The stories he uses are fairly effective though,

because they do give us an idea of what these women are going through. It helps bring to light

the issue of choice in movement, these women may not be actually locked up all day but theyre

still on a symbolic leash with their capturers. The majority of the statistics that are actually
connected to African-Americans and Sex trafficking are on the first page, in a four sentence

description of the essay. He uses some logos within the timeline of this issue, when organization

s have gotten involved and so forth. He also uses it to show the statistical value to these

problems, though it is statistics that are primarily not related to African-American women being

sex trafficked.

I think that Seraajs argument would have been more persuasive had he used more related

data and used his personal stories and connections. Because of his heavy reliance on the story, it

causes me to become emotionally attached to those few cases, rather than the issue as a whole. It

would have been better if he had included his own connection, why he cares or even just a story

of someone he knew that was involved in something of this nature. Without his own stories, with

the lack of ethos, it seemed to be far too robotic. In no way am I trying to discount the stories of

the women Seraaj interviewed, or even those whose stories are still untold, but the essay needs

more than just one or two people's traumatic experience. I am not part of Seraajs main audience,

which is partially why the persuasion was less effective but it did move me a bit. This is a main

issue, and no one should eve have to go through it, but I have a hard time taking this article too

seriously since it lacks many of the necessary ingredients for a paper to be successfully persuade

someone.

Citations
U.S. NewsJudge: California Cop Behaved 'Like a Pimp' With Teenager. The Associated Press,

19 May 2017, 5:24 P.M., www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2017-05-

19/judge-orders-oakland-officer-to-stand-trial-in-sex-scandal.

Seraaj. Human Trafficking and its Impact on the Black Community. The Orlando Advocate, 30

Nov. 2015, www.orlandoadvocate.com/human-trafficking-and-its-impact-on-the-black-

community/.