January is also known as Human Trafficking Awareness Month. It is a key time for us all as individuals to educate ourselves about human trafficking and crucially to learn to spot the signs of trafficking. It is also a time for us take these messages to our workplaces, our churches, our schools, our representatives and everywhere else.
National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, January 2025, culminates in the annual observation of National Freedom Day on February 1, 2025.
Human trafficking is a crime where one person exploits another for labor, services, or commercial sex, using force, fraud, or coercion (or where the person induced is under 18 years of age, in the case of a commercial sex act under U.S. law).
The crime also includes the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining a human being for these purposes and in these ways. Human trafficking is included under the umbrella term ‘modern-day slavery’, where victims cannot leave a situation of exploitation and are controlled by threats, punishment, violence, coercion or deception.
What is Human Trafficking? | Hope for Justice
Human Trafficking Facts
- $236 billion made each year from human trafficking, that’s nearly $7,500 every second[1]
- Women and girls make up 54% of all victims worldwide, and are 78% of victims of forced commercial sexual exploitation[2]
- Many U.S. businesses have human trafficking in their supply chains without even knowing it[3]
- Victims are told that police are corrupt, and that seeking help leads to being deported[4]
- In 2021, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 10,360 reports of suspected human trafficking cases, involving 16,710 victims[5]
- Traffickers make threats against victims’ families, using fear and shame as weapons[6]
- 1 in 6 endangered runaways reported are likely to be sex trafficking victims.[7]
- Human trafficking and people smuggling are different things[8]
Resources & Statistics | Hope for Justice
Health care providers are one of the few professionals likely to interact with trafficked women and girls while they are still in captivity. One study found that 28% of trafficked women saw a health care professional while still in captivity. This represents a serious missed opportunity for intervention.
Human Trafficking and the Health Care Industry – Polaris
Please check out our resource list.