Human trafficking happens all around us and can happen to anyone without many people noticing. Personally, one of my friends (their name will be Jane for anonymity) was almost put into a human trafficking situation. While Jane was walking out of a store, a man in sunglasses and an earpiece came out from behind a pillar and started walking behind her. Jane, thinking this was suspicious, started walking faster which caused the man to quicken his pace as well. Soon, two more men appeared on both sides of Jane, encircling her. A woman in a car drove between Jane and the men separating them and honked signaling that it was her time to escape. Jane then sprinted back into the store to tell someone about the dodgy men. While Jane was walked out to her car by a security man, they passed by the man with the earpiece standing in the front of the store. As Jane drove away, three black cars followed behind until she drove 10 miles away. After that experience, she could not stop shaking and crying. No one would have known what happened to Jane if she could not escape from the men’s grasps.

For Jane and many people like her, fellow Dakota High School students, Kayleigh King and Ashley Dobson, chose to do their HOSA community awareness project on human trafficking. Ashley believes that human trafficking prevention is important because “the things that victims go through affect them for the rest of their lives, if they even live to tell it. Most of the time victims are never found or are found dead by law enforcement, but if our society understands human trafficking more deeply, there is a possibility we can prevent it as a whole.” For the past three months, Kayleigh and Ashley have been working hard to spread awareness by hanging posters around our school, making social media accounts, and making bracelets to pass out to students which you can find in rooms 202, 218, and 226. Human trafficking is occurring in all places and we cannot be ignorant to it.

Visit their social media accounts to learn more about human trafficking so that you can protect yourself and be more aware of others around you.

Twitter: @DHSHumanTraffi1

Instagram: @dhs.humantrafficking

Facebook: @dhsstopthetraffic