Students might see people walking around with large red X’s on their hands on Feb. 23-27.

This is because next week the SASH organization will be raising awareness about human trafficking, the second largest organized crime in the world.

Every year  an estimated 27 million people are sold and bought as slaves; out of that number 60,100 enslaved people are in the United States.

27 million people holding hands could circle the globe; 27 million people could fill every football stadium in America 12 times; that many people is equivalent to the population of Texas, according to End It’s website.

Kansas City is one of the biggest hubs for sex trafficking in the United States; on average, people are sold for $90.

Slavery annually generates $150.2 billion, more than Amazon, Google, and Ebay, do in a single year.

Slavery exists in over 85 percent of the globe spanning across 167 countries.

In addition to drawing X’s on students’ hands, the program will also be showing a short film.

After school on Friday, they will be “taking a school-wide selfie of the students with an X on their hand,” Madie Selby, sophomore, said.

The organization that inspired Selby to start this movement is called End It: Shine a Light on Slavery. She found it online while doing research for a school project.

For the past couple of years Selby tried to get this program moving, but her ideas were often “shot down, and [she] probably came off as annoying and relentless,” she said.

“A lot of the time, we aren’t afraid to read about slavery in our textbooks, but when we hear about slavery today on the news, a lot of us just look away,” Selby said.

55% percent of forced labor victims are female and one in five victims are children. The average age of children when they are sold into the sex trade is 12-14 years old. That’s the average age of a seventh grader.

“Our generation is the one that can truly change things and I believe Olathe South is in it to ‘End It,’” Selby said.