January is National Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Labor trafficking contemplates a range of activities including ‘recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining’ … by ‘force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel someone to work.’ The employer is usually the trafficker and the employee considered a trafficking victim. Migrants are particularly vulnerable to this form of human trafficking. Female victims are often sexually abused, as well.
My maternal immigrant grandfather, his three brothers, and paternal great grandfather worked as children in the mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania.