Education

About This Section:

This section is a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) collection of educational materials we curated to inform, engage, and empower learners of all ages, from K-12 students to educators to community leaders. Our goal in creating this page is to bring together curricula, teaching guides and packets, syllabi, videos and documentaries, and other tools that can guide educators, parents, community members, and students to explore the complexities and realities of human trafficking

We want to equip our audience with a wide understanding of trafficking types, including:

Sex trafficking
Migrant and labor exploitation
Organ trafficking
Child labor
Cyber and online trafficking

Forced criminality
Forced begging
Surrogacy and reproductive exploitation
Forced Marriage/Child Brides
Online Safety
Relationship Safety

A Quick Warning!

For the best possible learning experience, we recommend that you follow along with our tags and categories to find what is appropriate for each age group, setting, or area of focus. We hope these are used to inform, educate, and prevent future trafficking-related harms. Teaching and learning about human trafficking should be taught in our schools, from as early as elementary school, and it should be accessible, informative, actionable, and trauma/victim-informed

For high school students and above, we encourage you to critically examine these videos. Please think about how human trafficking operates through the global and local markets, cultural and racial lenses, and legal/policy structures

Discussion Questions:

How do structures of human trafficking work together across borders, laws, and governments?
How can non-profits and governmental bodies attempt to combat human trafficking without "rescuing" victims and instead promote both material and systemic change?
How do you understand yourself and your own agency within markets of human trafficking?

Curricula (k-12)

This section includes structured lesson plans, modular units, and comprehensive curricula that are designed for classrooms from Kindergarten to College and community-based education. These resources specifically allow educators and facilitators to explore human trafficking through various lenses, from human rights perspectives to historical or legal settings. These materials are adaptable for different ages, from elementary school to college and beyond

Best For: Teachers, community educators/leaders, youth leaders, nonprofit workers, outreach/social service workers/organizations.

Please review each curriculum fully to tailor content and structure to learners’ ages and maturity levels

(Some content may contain mature language or explicit/sensitive content)

We recommend teaching materials work together with interactive teaching activities (found in packets!) and videos/survivor stories to make abstract themes and ideas more concrete

Discussion & reflection:

Highlight different perspectives, backgrounds, cultures, and experiences

PACKETS AND GUIDES

Packets should be shorter and portable guides for educators, facilitators, or community members. These can be used for workshops, mini-lessons, or units, or even awareness events. These resources provide hands-on and ready-to-go activities

Best For: Counselors, teachers, facilitators, community educators/leaders

Guidance:

Use as supplementary material (but can also stand alone); great for short lessons

Combine with other materials to deepen engagement

SYLLABI

This section highlights college and university-level courses’ syllabi centered on human trafficking, modern-day slavery, exploitation, current legal/ethical/moral debates, and other related topics. Syllabi provide various topics on human trafficking, some reading material suggestions appropriate at the college level, and analyses of the structural legal/socio-economic factors that drive trafficking in our global, domestic, and local communities. Syllabi focus on policy responses (and its inefficiencies) and regional case studies

Best for: Professors, researchers, college students, and seminar leaders

Guidance:

Syllabi as blueprint to adapt personal higher-education courses/seminars (can pick relevant modules/topics/trafficking types)

Adapt readings, assignments, and case studies to local contexts/needs/student level (High school/middle school audiences can even adapt!)

Encourage interdisciplinary and critical approaches. Trafficking is at the intersection between law, social work, policy, global markets, and cultural studies

VIDEOS

This section features short educational videos, animations, and documentaries suitable for a wide range of viewers, from elementary to college-level learners to adults. We included videos that cover different trafficking types. These are good introduction videos, supplemental materials, or even discussion starters for classrooms, workshops, or self-education

Best For: Teachers (media studies), advocacy nonprofits, independent learners interested in specific topics

Guidance:

Though we have vetted these videos and included recommendations for age groups, please watch through them and make appropriate decisions for you and your class

Preview all videos to ensure age-appropriateness!

We recommend guided discussion questions after videos

Documentaries

Fingers to the Bone: Child Farmworkers in the United States (United States, 2010)

Human Rights Watch exposes dangerous conditions of child labor in agricultural centers, often working because of extreme poverty with little pay, long hours, and dangerous work conditions

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Migrant, Labor (Child), Agricultural

Breaking Chains: Surviving Sex Trafficking and the Power of Second Chances (United States, 2025)

Short student film following the journey of a sex trafficking survivor who makes her way through Change Court. She receives support for trafficking victims, counseling, and eliminates their criminal records. Highlights dialogue with survivors and inspiring action

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Migrant, Labor (Child), Agricultural

How children in the US are trafficked on social media (United States, 2025)

Tina Frundt supports youth who are targeted and exploited on social media platforms, which give traffickers unprecedented levels of access to their victims. Tina works closely with law enforcement, social workers, and parents and exposes the dangerous cyberworld for youth

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): ONLINE, Sex

Forced to Beg: Tanzania's Trafficked Kids - BBC Africa Eye Documentary (Tanzania, 2022)

Following Families in poverty in Tanzania are tricked into giving up their disabled children to traffickers, but children are smuggled to Kenya and forced to beg, experiencing violence and exploitation at the hands of their traffickers.

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Forced begging

PBS Documentary: Trafficked in America (United States, 2021)

“Trafficked in America,” produced by Daffodil Altan and Andrés Cediel, follows Guatemalan teens forced to work against their will at a farm in Ohio.

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Migrant, Labor

Black Market Organs | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller (Global, 2023)

TRAFFICKED with Mariana van Zeller is an original documentary series that explores the complex and dangerous inner-workings of the global underworld, black and informal markets.

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Organ

Black Market Babies | Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller (Global, 2025)

Explores the babies-for-cash black market and the global surrogacy market

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Baby-laundering, Commercial Surrogacy

Drugged & Butchered: How Organ Traffickers Operate (Pakistan/Mexico, 2024)

The global black market for organs is thriving; VICE looks at how organ traffickers operate

Best For: College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Organ

Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (Kyrgyzstan, 2012)

Bride kidnapping is a supposedly ancient custom making a major comeback and now accounts for nearly half of all marriages in some parts. Vice explores forced marriage/Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Type(s): Forced bride

Inside the Nepalese Human Trafficking Industry (Nepal, 2020)

The documentary focuses on the Nepal-India border as Vice figures out why/how 50 Nepalese women disappear from that border area every day

Best For: High School, College, Self-Learn

Trafficking Types: Human (Broad)

Other Educational Materials:

Other supplemental tools include internet safety modules, podcasts, awareness campaigns, online simulations and activities, and trauma/victim-informed teaching guides. These resources help educators and facilitators approach trafficking education safely and sensitively, especially recognizing that some learners may have personal experiences with trafficking or exploitation

Best For: Community educators/leaders, parents, teachers, youth leaders

Guidance:

Approach content/discussions with care and sensitivity!!

Check in with students and provide support resources!!

READING LIST

This section consists of a list of reading resources spanning from books to research papers, thus giving readers options of both free and paid resources to expand their knowledge on human trafficking and the systems that support and encourage it. All resources in this section are meant for those who are high school students and older and are not appropriate for younger audiences

The books listed range from those that cover case studies and specific types of human trafficking, like labor and sex trafficking, to books covering theory like racial capitalism, and those that provide readers with an analysis of the system that allows for and encourages human trafficking in all its forms

The research Papers and Briefs are provided along with a link thus allowing for readers to access them immediately to continue their personal research. These papers are largely more focused on their topic and are shorter in comparison to the books, also allowing them to be completed in shorter spans of time.

Research Papers & Briefs

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Education

A Quick Warning!

Curricula (k-12)

PACKETS AND GUIDES

SYLLABI

VIDEOS

Documentaries

Fingers to the Bone: Child Farmworkers in the United States (United States, 2010)

Breaking Chains: Surviving Sex Trafficking and the Power of Second Chances (United States, 2025)

How children in the US are trafficked on social media (United States, 2025)

Forced to Beg: Tanzania's Trafficked Kids - BBC Africa Eye Documentary (Tanzania, 2022)

Other videos

UNODC: Human Trafficking (2019)

NetSmartz (Spanish available)

Other Educational Materials:

READING LIST

Research Papers & Briefs