“I have a tracker in me,” read the cryptic note, found in triage by a greenhorn doctor — scribbled by a woman in the emergency room.
She claimed to have been implanted
with a GPS tracking device of some kind — an assertion not unheard of,
but never the less unusual.
Dr. A, anonymous for safety concerns,
rolled his eyes — ordinarily, such a note would be a sure indicator of
mental illness, for which a psychiatrist would need to be summoned.
But this woman appeared lucid. Sane. Not at all paranoid or delusional.
And she had an incision.
So an x-ray was performed, and
medical personnel gathered to view the results. But they stood
breathless in disbelief — indeed, while they didn’t find a GPS tracker,
“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” Dr. A recounted for Marketplace’s Dan Gorenstein. “But
it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no
one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying
something.”
“It was a small glass capsule with a little almost like a circuit board inside of it,” the 28-year-old doctor.
Shock turned fast to concern when the
doctors grasped what the presence of the object signaled about the
20-something woman’s life — and why she’d handed over the bizarre note.
“It’s an RFID chip. It’s used to tag cats and dogs, And someone
had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they
owned.”
In fact, the unnamed woman had been treated as a pet — a possession — by her boyfriend, who sold her for sex and pocketed the money she brought back.
She was one of an innumerable amount of victims of human trafficking — a colossal problem in every corner of the globe, including the United States — where Dr. A has residency at a hospital in a ‘major American city,’ Marketplace discreetly noted.
That modern day slavery is alive and
unfortunately booming, even in the U.S., might jar the somnambulant
masses — after all, schools rightly cover the nation’s history of
antebellum slavery quite thoroughly. But human trafficking and
exploitation constitutes a modern iteration of baneful practice.
“Very plainly,” Katherine Chon, director of the newly created Office on Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told Gorenstein, “human trafficking is when one person takes advantage of another person for some profit.”
Sex isn’t the only reason people buy
other people — human trafficking sadly staffs a number of industries
with forced laborers, from the menial and repetitive tasks of
manufacturing, to domestic service.
Under threat of violent punishment —
or worse — victims often endure horrific trauma and find it difficult,
if not impossible, to alert others to their circumstances for
assistance.
Human traffickers should be shot. How utterly sickening.
Can we fucking take human trafficking to be the serious shit that it is? If you think somebody’s boyfriend is the only person chipping people and selling them I don’t know if you’re lucky or just naive, or both. This shit isn’t an isolated incident. It’s representative of an international business model that is disturbingly common.
im in love with the concept of Las Vegas like i know in reality theres a lot of things shitty and bad about it but im in love with the idea of a capital of debauchery existing in a blisteringly hot desert 2 hours away from a nuclear weapon test site. it’s so bizarre and horrific and tacky i can’t help but loving the idea of it
