The effects Human trafficking has on stress and anxiety on their victims.
 

India is a country where the population reaches the billions. One of the many things people warned me about was the street scams and the theft that occurs to tourists. One of the concerns that friends and family had was mainly about health and wellness. Being a tourist, you walk around with a target on your back for these scams and become a target for trafficking and kidnapping. This leads to the question of what the residents of the country think about human trafficking and what are long-term effects that victims experience, and what resources they use to console victims of human trafficking. My research focus will be on the long-term effects human trafficking has on the stress and anxiety of the victims.

Some reason human trafficking occurs is to force victims to work. This is mainly focused on men and children; victims can be raped. This primarily happens to the women and children who get trafficked. Based on several news articles published in India, there were 6,000 plus victims of human trafficking in the year 2022. In the United States, reports of human trafficking are low, but those unreported tend to be higher. As numbers increase, those at risk of being trafficked, mainly those in poverty, have to feel stress about being trafficked and have a sense of anxiety, wandering, and thinking they can get taken at any moment. Some non-profits help those at risk or victims cope with their issues and reintegrate them back after being trafficked. To name a few, the Rescue Foundation has helped over 5,00 victims and is based in Mumbai. Their goal is to work with prosecutors to seek justice for the victims of trafficking.

My goal for this topic would be to understand the connection between trafficking and its long-term effects on the victims. Understanding the relationship between trafficking and mental health can lead to finding ways to support victims in hiding and help them get the help they deserve. To help me with this, I would like to see survivors willing to share their experiences and how they cope with the aftermath. Finding their history to find similarities between the stories will help support the idea that it mainly happens to a specific demographic. I would like to hear both male and female stories; people primarily think about human trafficking and associate it with women. However, giving the men a platform to talk will hopefully allow other victims to share their stories and not be as afraid. Prerana is another non-profit that seeks to rehabilitate victims and work with them to gain skills to find and keep jobs to help them out in the future. These organizations also inform others on ways to prevent human trafficking and help those that have fallen victim. An article by (Ottisova et al., 2018) stated that children who fell victim to human trafficking deal with more extended periods of trauma and are subject to complex levels of post-traumatic stress.

Some concerns with this would mainly be, finding victims willing to tell their stories and share how they deal with mental health problems that came after the experience. The language barrier can be a problem when trying to hear a story. However, the main concern would be finding victims and having them share their stories with me. I understand that the experiences they may have dealt with are traumatic, so asking questions regarding their experience to be precise and not offend or make them feel bad is critical to these interviews.

Giving victims of human trafficking a platform to speak up and cope with their emotions and understanding the long-term effects trafficking has on the victims is my goal for my summer research.