A Reason Why?

I’ve spent so much time the pay few weeks trying to think of a new angle to approach these posts with. I want to examine all the sides of the story. There is so much chatter surrounding the victims and I’ve talked about female traffickers before, but what about male traffickers? What causes someone to wake up one day and decide to go into the slave business? I like to believe that most people are inherently good, but I can’t think of a word to describe traffickers other than “evil”. I firmly believe that a lack of education in many respects plays a huge role in why men traffic, the same way a lack of education leaves some societies still denying women the chance to go to school or blaming the woman for her own rape. If men are being taught that women are beneath them, able to be controlled, it’s no wonder men have started selling them the same way they would cattle. People (curiously, mostly men) like to say that women have achieved equality with men in recent years. In the United States, we’re coming closer, but the fact that girls still have to be fearful, walking alone at night, of predators lurking in the shadows proves that we’re not as close some would like to think. In other countries around the world, forget about walking at night, in many places a woman can’t even walk around alone period. This gap in the rights of men and women is still keeping women in the position of the “weaker” sex, the more easily victimized gender. While I do not condone or make excuses for anybody that partake in the trafficking of people, I can recognize why that might happen in many parts of the world.
The second issue that puzzles me about traffickers is how a family, husband & wife, can traffic people. I heard about a husband/ wife operation in which the trafficking victims were forced to work in a restaurant all day and then were brought to the traffickers’ home and made to do the cooking and cleaning, even babysitting. Here are these innocent people that this couple saw as inhuman enough to keep as slaves, and yet they have them caring for their children? Are you kidding me? That makes zero sense to me. Now their kids being brought up in this environment, teaching this behavior to the next generation. Does this couple not love each other or the children? I don’t see how anyone capable of feeling anything even close to love can enslave another person. These are the questions that keep me up at night. Not only do we have to rescue the trafficking victims but we have to figure out a way to change how people think about others. We need to make people see that selling humans is not an acceptable way to make a living. Period.