What is Human Trafficking?

In 2001, the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons (ITEMP) was founded by humanitarian rights activist Patrick Atkinson in an effort to help prevent, detect, and prosecute human trafficking.

A very serious crime and great infringement on personal rights, human trafficking, also known as trafficking in person, has affected almost every country in the world. Human trafficking is the transit, transfer, conscription, harboring, or receipt of people through threat, force, abduction, deceit, or the abuse of power. Criminals engage in human trafficking for purposes such as sexual exploitation, slavery, and forced labor.

Sex trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor are three common types of human trafficking. Victims of human trafficking usually show signs of controlled movement and limited social interactions.

Occurring in over forty different countries, human trafficking is common in Tier 3 countries. Every year, the US department investigates countries for its annual trafficking in person report. According to Worldatlas Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Iran, and Eritrea have consistently appeared on the annual human trafficking report from 2011 to 2018. While Syria, Central African Republic, and Mauritania have featured seven times out of the eight years, Russia, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, and Guinea Bissau have featured six times.

Please visit www.ITEMP.org for more information.

Hospital Dedicated to Malnourished Children Open in Guatemala

A champion in the fight against human trafficking, international human rights activist Patrick Atkinson founded the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited, and Missing Persons (ITEMP), La Asociacion Nuestros Ahijados, and The GOD’S CHILD Project to pave the way for the anti-human trafficking movement. Patrick Atkinson’s charitable works also extend to providing medical help to malnourished, starving, or abandoned children through Casa Jackson Hospital for Malnourished Children, opened by The GOD’S CHILD Project in Guatemala.

Built by The GOD’S CHILD Project, the original Casa Jackson Hospital for Malnourished Children opened in 2006. After a devastating flood destroyed the building, The GOD’S CHILD Project relocated the hospital to a temporary facility while a new building could be constructed. The new facility for Casa Jackson Hospital for Malnourished Children was officially dedicated and opened for use in Antigua, Guatemala on March 31, 2017. Its mission is the same: to help children survive from and overcome the effects of starvation and malnutrition. The new hospital has the capacity to rehabilitate as many as 62 children at once.

UNICEF and the World Food Program have noted that Guatemala has the highest malnutrition-related childhood mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. Guatemala’s chronic malnutrition rate is also the world’s fourth highest. Estimates count nearly half of all Guatemalan children as malnourished; this can result in weak immune systems, stunted growth, low IQ, and possible death.

Despite these disheartening facts, organizations such as The GOD’S CHILD Project are dedicated to fighting malnutrition. The Project’s hospital in Antigua aims to help stabilize malnourished children by engaging more volunteers to help rehabilitate victims and provide for their nutritional needs.

The Costs of Human Trafficking

Patrick Atkinson is the executive director of The God’s Child Project, an organization that has worked to help orphaned, neglected, and exploited young people and women in Central America since 1991. In addition, Patrick Atkinson leads the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited, and Missing Persons (ITEMP), a nonprofit that works to end human trafficking around the world.

In human trafficking, people of any age or gender may be held against their will in economic or sexual slavery. The traffickers and abusers use physical force, fraud, or emotional coercion to ensnare their victims and keep them under control.

Estimates put the number of human trafficking victims in the world today at 20 to 30 million. Some estimates put the cost of obtaining a human slave at only $90 US, far less than the figure many historians assign to the purchase of a human being at the height of the 19th-century slave trade.

The increase in poverty, conflict, and societal instability around the world continue to make human trafficking easier. Organizations such as ITEMP are working to make human trafficking more difficult.

A Message for My Child Delivers a Positive Message for Children

Patrick Atkinson has served as the executive director of The God’s Child Project since 1991. In addition, he is the executive director of the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited, and Missing Persons, and for Asociacion Nuestros Ahijados, the Guatemala-based arm of The God’s Child Project. Through these organizations, Patrick Atkinson works to support human rights.

In 2017, The Chronicle, a publication for Minnesota’s Twin Cities region, profiled Patrick Atkinson and his work in Central America, Vietnam, and the streets of New York City, where he has helped lift vulnerable people from addiction, exploitation, and other dangers. His book, A Message for My Child, was written to promote personal safety for young people.

A Message for My Child urges young people to make positive decisions that will lead them to success. With illustrations by the author’s son, the book delivers powerful and inspirational points in simple language and a tone of acceptance that will resonate with children and teens.

The book emphasizes that parents can teach good behavior and try to help their children develop strong character, but ultimately each individual is responsible for his or her own life choices. A Message for My Child has received worldwide praise, with more than 1 million copies distributed internationally. The book has been translated into 27 different languages and is part of the permanent school curriculum in the country of India.