Human Trafficking Research

We are a public-facing, research-grounded site that synthesizes human trafficking scholarship, law, data, and lived experiences for public, policy, and academic use. Our mission is urgent: To understand human trafficking because accessible, culturally-relevant, and accurate information saves lives. We believe that no market, nation, or information should trap and conceal people in trafficking cycles. This site is informed by other significant global anti-trafficking efforts, such as the Polaris Project, so that we can learn from and participate in resource and knowledge exchange.

Using the United Nations model and the Polaris Project, this website defines human trafficking as a form of modern slavery, which is the recruitment, transportation, and sheltering or concealing of people by force, fraud, or deception, with the intent of exploiting victims to gain profit.

Through a lens of profit, visibility, and mobility, human trafficking can be understood threefold: (1) The exploitation of people driven by a racially globalized demand for profit and cheap goods, which operate through (2) networks, systems, and media that control visibility by dictating who is seen and who is invisible, and (3) by restricting and facilitating movement across borders and domestic spaces.

Profit

Traffickers profit from these systems by stealing wages earned from workers' labor. Exploiters can be individual criminals or criminal enterprises that take advantage of vulnerable human beings (Human Rights First). Through globalization, producers compete with other producers from all over the world by minimizing prices. Siddarth Kara writes that the two constant forces that drive human trafficking are a demand for profit on behalf of the producer and a demand for cheap goods on the part of the consumer (Kara 2011, 70).

According to the International Justice Mission and ILO, human trafficking generates about $236 billion a year, with 73% of illegal profits produced from commercial sexual exploitation, despite having a smaller number of victims compared to labor trafficking. The Coalition to Fight Financial Crime estimates the profits from human trafficking are $498 billion, far beyond the ILO’s estimates of $236 billion (Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime, 2024).

According to the ILO:

1. Sex trafficking generates $173 billion.

2. The labor trafficking industry generates $35 billion.

3. The services trafficking industry generates $20.8 billion.

4. The agriculture trafficking industry generates $5.0 billion.

5. The domestic work trafficking industry generates $2.6 billion.

Visibility

Human trafficking is paradoxically visibilised and invisibilised through state, media, and market mechanisms that selectively determine which lives are legible and which are obscured.

Visibility is mistakenly equated with justice. “Despite the dominant narrative focused on the invisibility of migrants in creating vulnerability to human trafficking, simultaneous patterns of selective visibilisation of this population have also contributed to human trafficking and exploitation” (Royal Geographical Society). Race, gender, and class determine whose pain is marketable and whose can be ignored, which shapes policing procedures, prosecution methods, and press coverage.

“These selective processes of invisibilisation and visibilisation—described in this paper as constructive (in)visibility—are neither apolitical nor undifferentiated (Aliverti, 2018; Pratt, 2005). Instead, the processes of (in)visibilisation are relational; people are excluded differentially and ‘reduced to bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) by border processes that target particular racialised, gendered or othered bodies (Pratt, 2005; Yohannes, 2021).”

Mobility

According to the DOJ, “Human smuggling is the illegal movement of a person across a border.” “Human trafficking is the illegal exploitation of a person and does not require movement,” but is often part of the trafficking process.

Traffickers may organize or facilitate travel under false pretenses, promising legitimate work or migration opportunities to bring new victims into trafficking operations as well as transport current victims (Polaris). In some cases, transportation is provided at no initial cost, while in others, victims are charged excessive fees for travel, documentation, or recruitment, which can later result in debt bondage and financial dependence on traffickers. Such is the case for many individuals trafficked to the U.S. from Latin America who incurred sometimes thousands of dollars of fees to cover transport, visas, and profit for the recruiters (George Mason University).

To restrict mobility, traffickers may confiscate identification or immigration documents such as passports, visas, and work permits, making it difficult for victims to seek help and threatening to report them to local authorities. In other instances, victims are physically prevented from leaving through surveillance, confinement, or isolation. For example, security measures for online scam compounds located in Southeast Asia often include high walls with barbed wire, guards posted at gates, and threats of violence (Franceschini et al.).

About this site

This website seeks to provide comprehensive definitions and resources for selected forms of human trafficking. Throughout our research, we combat the stereotype that trafficking is a singular issue only involving people outside of the U.S. We share the liberatory potentials of anti-trafficking efforts, as we still remain critical of and demand responsibility from the institutions we are taught to trust the most. We aim to provide victims and communities with information and resources through a collaborative, theoretical praxis, but we acknowledge that transformational change can only occur with a concentrated effort from structural and individual forces working together.