Trafficking Facts

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  • 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)