Child Trafficking

The United Nations Office on Drug and Crime defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”¹ Trafficking occurs for a number of reasons, some of which are prostitution, sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery and organ harvesting.² Coercion, abduction, fraud and deception are used to recruit, transfer, house or receive victims.³ Vulnerable populations come from all over the world, yet are typically moving from less developed nations to more developed nations.⁴ Children make up 28 percent of trafficking victims worldwide, yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa, they account for 62 percent of victims, and in Central America and the Caribbean, they make up 64 percent.⁵ Twenty percent of victims are young girls, and 8 percent are boys. Girls are often trafficked for marriage or sexual servitude while boys are often forced into exploitative, intense labor like mining or combat.⁶ Sex trafficking — on a whole — is a $99 billion industry worldwide, and the sexual exploitation of over a million children accounts for 20 percent of that profit. In the United States alone, children are purchased for sexual exploitation 2.5 million times a year. Between 8 and 10,000 children ages 13–17 in the United States are in the commercial sex industry.⁷ To date, 158 nations have criminalized human trafficking, yet the rate of convictions for human trafficking offenders is low.⁸