Huddled in a far off corner of a dark room that smells of feces and death, a young girl shivers in a fit of a useless attempt at sleep. She waits for what she knows is to come as it does every day, a hand. This hand shoots out at her and strangles her long, tangled hair into its fist and drags her out into the cruel open world away from the dark room that suddenly becomes much more appealing. It pulls her past the many small rooms, hidden only by a simple cloth and muffled voices of taboo whispers, into a decaying room where it whips across her face leaving a stinging imprint of reality. The little girl smears her face with shadows of kohl and ripens her too young lips with stains that remind her of the blood that she will surely see soon enough. After the girl has been made, the hand drags her into one of the many small rooms where she sits until a man comes in and forces her into acts that a girl her age wouldn’t even dare to whisper about. Once her gentle self has been fully torn apart it is sewed together without something to numb the pain so that it can be done over and over again. After what seems to be decades the hand returns, somewhat occupied by the minimal money the girl earned with her body, and throws her promptly back into the small dank room again.

This cycle repeats itself day after day for millions of girls. It is the horror of what is now called modern day slavery, human trafficking. Most people are under the preconceived notion that slavery ended hundreds of years ago, yet the truth is that it continues every day. Over twenty-seven million people, real human beings, are sold like property every year. That’s more than the population of Texas. Even the idea of something like that is sickening in itself, but it doesn’t just happen in some far away, third world country. It happens in the United States equally so, including Richmond, Virginia. People have no idea that this kind of torture is going on every day, and I didn’t either until I met the people of the Prevention Project. The Prevention Project is a group initiative that is working on educating youth, and adults, on the horrors of human trafficking. Over the past year I have been working alongside them going to my community to spread the awareness in the hopes of creating more modern day abolitionists. My hope is that organizations like the Prevention Project can continue to get their message out by receiving funding, or that schools implement a program so that the most risk age groups can be informed about this pandemic that has swept our nation, no, planet. Yes, money is tight, but convincing our representatives to support anti-human trafficking bills to be passed would mean that more little girls could be saved.