Every Two Minutes, a Child is being Prepared for Sexual Exploitation and Human Trafficking.

Every two minutes, a child is being prepared for sexual exploitation, according to a report from Unicef.

Perhaps more disturbing, according to Shared Hope International, is that child victims might be raped, or used for sex for money, by 6,000 men over the course of her victimization.

It is not something that we as a society want to recognize, want to acknowledge, and to fight. It is horrifying and depressing. It makes us feel uncomfortable. Yet, child sex trafficking is all around us. It is in our cities, and even in our neighborhoods. And it is happening to our children, with the average age of a child being trafficked at only 12 years old. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn put it wisely when she said, “They’re not even old enough to go to a prom, not even old enough to get a driver’s license and yet we still are seeing more and more of it on the Internet.” The number of children being contacted by sexual predators online is disturbing and astounding at the same time. Approximately one out of every seven children is sexually contacted, or solicited, by a predator while online. Furthermore, many of these children are seriously pursued online by these predators, singling out these children in an attempt to lure them in.

Shockingly, this story is all too familiar in America. According to Polaris, a nonprofit working to combat modern-day slavery and human trafficking, there has been a 13 percent jump in identified cases from 2016 to 2017.

In August of 2022, four people were arrested and 28 teen victims were rescued in Georgia during an FBI-led operation that focused on child sex trafficking. In Arizona during August of 2022, 21 more were arrested in Project Back to Skool for trafficking minors. During the same month, a nationwide human trafficking bust saw the FBI rescue 121 minors from human trafficking across the nation. September of 2022 saw 160 people arrested in Florida during an undercover human trafficking operation.

Child sex trafficking is an ugly secret that many in America refuse to accept, or refuse…