Trafficking Facts
- Human trafficking is now the 2nd largest and fastest growing illegal trafficking activity in the world. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2008)
- The annual market value of human trafficking is $32+ billion. (Ibid.) 80% of victims are women and 50% are children. (Trafficking in Persons Report 2007, U.S. Department of State)
- Globally, one million children are forced to work in the sex industry every year. (Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, 2007)
- Among the millions trafficked each year, hundreds of thousands are teenage girls, some as young as five years of age. (Ibid)
- In the U.S., handlers, “pimps,” can make $100,000 a year, per child.
- Child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry and among the fastest growing criminal segments on the Internet. Child pornography fuels the child sex trade. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)
- 90% of trafficking victims are domestic U.S. citizens.
- The average life expectancy of a trafficking victim is only seven years after the exploitation begins. (Woolf, 2014)
- The average age a child is first commercially sexually exploited in the U.S. is 13 years of age. (Ibid)
- Since 2001 fewer than 1,000 minor sex trafficking victims in the U.S. have been assisted by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. (Ibid)
- 10% of trafficked children were kidnapped. (Karla Dial, “Reaching Into the Dark,” Citizen Magazine, March 2010, 5)