Until the late fall of my senior year of high school, I still was unsure of what major I wanted to pursue, let alone do with my life at all. This was particularly difficult because I needed to fill out college applications and it was hard to chose which perspective major I wanted. I was stuck between two very different majors: Education and criminology. If you are reading this blog, its pretty obvious which major I have more passion for.

Nevertheless, I discovered a prominent issue in our society during senior year that is often not talked openly as often as it should. I discovered how close and how often sex trafficking occurs. One day I was watching the news, and their was a story about a sex trafficking ring that was located and confirmed almost 20 minutes away from my house. I also live in a neighborhood with an elementary school down the street, and a high school less than a mile down the road. It was scary to me how close it is occurring and how no one has ever spoken to me about it and how to be aware of it. I wasn’t even certain I knew what it was, but I did learn its basically selling people into slavery for sexual exploitation.

I had only heard about sex trafficking affecting young women and children in areas with poverty and very dangerous places in the world. Little did I know, it is affecting a wide range of people of all classes and all races and it is still very prevalent in today’s society, especially in college.

As college students, I think its an important topic to discuss. It is one of scariest true crime scenarios that could happen, and we need to understand how this happens and how to prevent it. An article about sex trafficking on college campuses claims, “…victims who get involved are voluntary at first.” The reason this occurs is because in college, we are in one of the most vulnerable places in our lives. It is the first time we are completely on our own, and we have a wide range of responsibilities- financially.

I was researching online ways to prevent sex trafficking, and one of the top answers I discovered is to raise awareness. I think this is the easiest way to stop the problem, and I personally don’t believe my community where I live in does enough about it.

Discovering this problem and researching it contributes a lot to why I want to pursue Criminology. Its interesting to discover how many communities world wide and in America are actively dealing with this problem, and what we can do to stop it. I firmly believe we will make progress stopping these problems if we just think about it more and talk about it more.

https://www.dressember.org/blog/collegestudentsandtrafficking