Please tell the United Nations that males get HIV/AIDS from being trafficked, too.
A Google search for “Human Trafficking and HIV/AIDS” will bring you to an article from the United Nation’s Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking. Here’s a screenshot of the introduction:
As the title of the article does not address a specific perspective on women and girls, the article should, at the absolute bare minimum, include “boys.” How many students around the world are writing essays about this exact topic? How many others are stumbling upon this article in their quest to simply learn about human trafficking? Our definition to them, to the many individuals who are victims and/or survivors and to the many others joining the fight against human trafficking must be accurate. The article continues:
I have no objection to the inclusion of “women and girls.” In my international research I’ve found that women and girls do represent the majority of sex trafficking victims. My problem is with the exclusion. This article isn’t about percentages or a particular sex; it’s about the crime and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS within the crime. There are thousands of boys with HIV as a result of being trafficked. There are thousands of trafficked boys who have grown into men and are dying from AIDS. And, yes, there are many men who have been trafficked and now live with HIV/AIDS as a result.
Readers, please join me in Tweeting this article directly to @UNGIFTraffick
See Related Articles
– Human Trafficking: The Other 20%
– The Forgotten Many: Sex Trafficked Boys
– The Misconceptions of Human Trafficking
The UNHCR has recently released a report calling for awareness and a response to sexualized violence directed at men and boys. It is a profoundly significant step in the right direction. Our concern is that such organizations charge forward without including or taking counsel from survivors. I suppose the machinery moves slowly. The issue here is that for a kid struggling to make it to the next day, 6 months is a lifetime.
Thank you Cameron. Please join the survivors who are so courageously speaking out (with the protection of video art, photographic collages and poetry). Every turns away. They fall outside everyone’s funding remit. So they are building safe houses and evolving their online peer-mentored art school for survivors (currently works with boys from 18 countries). You can see a little of their work at http://www.real-stories-gallery.org. If anyone is located in NYC we are having a brainstorming meeting next week to evolve the survivor-led work into a grass-roots ARTS initiative that brings greater awareness to our localities – Smash Street Boys Festival.… Read more »
Everything I have read about human trafficking, both sex and non sex trafficking indicates that boys(men) are actually the majority of the victims, only sex trafficking appears to have women as the majority. I have also read numerous articles on “rape as a weapon of war” and more and more we are finding that men are raped in damn near equal numbers you just rarely hear about them. I was reading some time ago about a UK (I think) reporter who did some work on this in the congo and he reported a huge number of male victims and that… Read more »
Dear Cameron,
Tweeted, Facebooked, Google +ed and every thing else I could think of. Thanks for your work on this. All the rest of you reading this. Start sharing hitting those share buttons!
As did I.
You make a very valid point. When you think of trafficking you think of predominantly girls and young women. The UN has some very big issues to deal with yet all of this could be managed better through improvement of border control across the world. Organised crime will always find a way of breaching a border and falsifying documents.
Thank you so much for doing this!
Cameron thank you for your continued amazing work.
Your link to the UN initiative is broken.
As for the topic itself, the UN is not going to recognize men and boys as victims. The UN already provides little to no assistance to male victims to begin with, and no outreach at all to raise awareness about it. If they were inclined to change their mind, the women’s groups pushing the UN to treat this issue as a women’s issue would cry foul. The UN is not going to change its mind.
Dear Jacobtk,
If your intention here was to fuel me to not quit until they change their definition, well played. If not, well, we’ll see about that.
~Cameron
I’ve noticed such treatment of male victims in most forms of the media and assistance programs. (I mean look at even topics where the victims are mostly male, like forcing children to fight. It’s mostly boys but at best they are all called “children” while when it comes to sexual slavery it’s mostly girls and they are called girls as such. I don’t hold it against anyone for concluding that these organizations and entities don’t think very much of males (and good luck if you’re an adult male civilian in a war torn area). As for the topic itself, the… Read more »