Scholarly Source

Texas A&M students have a great opportunity since they can search and access hundreds and thousands of scholarly articles that are available a mouse-click away. The university subscribes to many online journals that are peer-reviewed and publish continually evolving ideas and experiments about medicine and social issues.Scholarly articles are usually found in renowned journals such as Science, are peer reviewed,have multiple references from other scholars, and use terms relating to the field that is being talked about. For students, the only way to find articles through TAMU is through the library website at library.tamu.edu. From here, you can search for a specific article, database, book, or journal. 


I decided to type in the topic of human trafficking and found over 200 articles. Not all articles I found were considered peer reviewed. One way to check this is when following the link to the actual article. Although it's hard to see, the yellow note on the right-hand side says peer reviewed. 

In an article talking about torture in human trafficking, Lee Schwecke talks about Ritual Abuse-Torture, how it affects its victims, and what can be done to help them recover. RAT takes many forms and includes many violent acts. Alcohol and drugs can be used to gain control over victims, and it's common that victims are threatened in order to keep silent. There is an association between trafficking and RAT. "Human trafficking victims 
may be subjected to any of the tactics used with RAT victims to ensure traffickers’ power and control and maintenance of compliance and silence," notes Schwecke. Often times, people who are tortured and abused refuse to talk because they are threatened to stay silent or do not want to revisit painful memories if they are ever taken from that environment. Treatment is addressed as well. Special care and consideration must be given in order for patients to open up about their past and cope with everything that has happened instead of resorting to other outlets such as anger, anxiety, and self-destructive behaviors. Through this, the author is addressing an issue and its prevention. How can professionals identify these people and how can they help them? What are the resources available? We need to be proactive in helping them overcome.


Schwecke, Lee H. "Beyond Childhood Sexual Abuse: Ritual Abuse-Torture and Human Trafficking." Journal of psychosocial nursing and mental health services 49.1 (2011): 8,8-10. PsycINFO. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.

A Life Account from the Bible

Genesis 37:28 (ESV)
Then the Midianite traders passed by. And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt.


Only a couple weeks ago, I was attending Breakaway, a gathering of hundreds of college students coming together listening to a sermon once a week. Ben Stuart was preaching about Joseph and how he resented his brothers, but one thing caught my attention close to the beginning of the sermon. Ben mentioned that in lieu of all the things Joseph's brothers did and everything that happened to Joseph throughout his lifetime, we can add that Joseph was trafficked. Taking a closer look at this verse in the Bible and the passage surrounding this verse, it says Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery for twenty shekels of silver. 


When Ben said this I nearly jumped out of my seat. I've heard this story dozens of times from beginning to end. I've seen cartoons and read books, but it never dawned on me that Joseph experienced all this. It's still all very similar to what happens nowadays too, and this took place thousands of years ago. Joseph, like victims of trafficking today, was a slave in the house of an influential man named Potiphar, then subjected to Potiphar's wife who tried to use him for sex, and finally thrown into jail and forgotten about for years. No one he loved knew if he was even alive until a great famine hit Israel and the surrounding countries. Joseph's story finally arrives at a happy ending. He reunites with his brother and father. Unfortunately, not all stories of human trafficking turn out this way. If people don't die being trafficked, drugged, forced to do intense work, or beaten, they certainly have a long, hard life ahead of them. I hope this story just gives us some perspective of how long this issue has been around and the differences and similarities we see as it has transformed over many, many years.

Audience Analysis

As I was searching blogs about human trafficking, it's evident that human trafficking isn't a highly debated topic. Most people seem to inspire a call to action towards their readers. Blogs range from firsthand experience after dealing with victims of trafficking to research of its prevalence throughout the world.


The two blogs I have decided to analyze are about human services offered online. This has become a growing problem that correlates with our dependency on internet usage. The internet is also easily accessible to many people throughout the world nowadays. The first blog focuses on the actual selling of human services found on the website known as craigslist.org. The second blog was found on the tosh.o website as Daniel Tosh shares his opinion of a young girl selling her mother on ebay.


Children for Sale on Craigslist:


I'm assuming that when a person thinks about human trafficking, there are negative thoughts and opinions about it; after all, it is illegal, not to mention, just plain wrong. Shelley Seale uses real life instances and quotes from the Director of the Polaris Project, a movement that combats human slavery to convey her feelings about the shady business deals found on craisglist. Seale quotes Chon who says, "In one recent case, two Chicago women were charged for selling girls as young as 14 years old on Craigslist. The girls were forced to have sex with 10-12 men per day, and the traffickers made tens of thousands of dollars." As soon as I read this I immediately gawked in disgust with an "oh my God. That is just sick." It's so easy to gain the support of your readers by just giving the details. In many ways this is like Maus. Shelley is sharing the actuality of the situation without exaggerating the specifics. 


Don't Sell People on eBay:


As mentioned earlier, a woman's granddaughter had the bright idea to try and sell her grandmother over eBay. In hilarious Tosh.0 fashion, Daniel Tosh makes this incidence the center of his blog post. Since it was quite an odd occurrence, it became the butt of many jokes. Not to mention, your everyday, run of the mill sex trafficking guru usually doesn't take the form of a 10 year old girl. This instance is so easy to capitalize on for an easy punchline on a late night show or on a parody like Team America.

Rhetorical Analysis of Visual Media

Human trafficking. Modern-day slavery. It spans across countries and continents. All of this takes on many forms and names. Ultimately, it's buying and selling human beings to perform multiple tasks spanning from sexual favors to intense labor. Multiple political cartoons are the basis for these two types of trafficking. Since I have been talking about trafficking regarding mainly women in sexual situations, I found a cartoon that explains human trafficking voicing opinions about slave labor.

This cartoon is a prime example of slave labor in America and the misinformation we tend to have about it. As seen, the producer is stunned when his customer asks tough questions about slave labor after she read a local newspaper. The producer uses marketing claims such like "pesticide free" in order to make his product more appealing, even though it was potentially not "blood-free, tears-free, and abuse-free." This leads the audience to the question of how much do we really know about the production of our food? Although America has had a less than perfect track record regarding human rights, people in general, tend to think differently about slavery nowadays. When we hear of people having absolutely no rights it disgusts us. This is exactly the point of the cartoon. It evokes an emotion to be proactive and certainly not stand for any product that have been processed under slave conditions. 

Even though it might spur a radical response in a couple of people, the main point is to make Americans think about the little things we can do to make sure we never support this type of crooked labor carried out in America or even the world.