Statistics on Modern Slavery

One form of modern slavery is sex trafficking. This involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. It’s incredibly hard to have good numbers on this since you want to exclude willing professionals who are simply traveling in search of a better income. But how do you know which prostitute is willing and which isn’t? It’s estimated that globally 1 million girls and women are trafficked into brothels annually, and that 10,000 to 20,000 sex slaves are brought into the U.S. annually. The UNODC estimates the number of victims of human trafficking at any one time at 2.5 million, 80% of those are women trafficked as sex slaves (the rest as slaves in homes or sweatshops).

However, those numbers could be totally off the mark (source). Usually, the numbers are extrapolated on the basis of the numbers of known cases, i.e. cases that have ended up with the police or in court. As victims of sex trafficking are particularly well hidden (it’s a type of crime that’s vastly underreported since the victims are under total control by their bosses) you need to multiply the known cases by a certain number, but that number is by definition a very rough guess.

Hence the large differences between estimates:

(source)

Similar caveats are necessary for other types of forced labor.

There’s an interesting database here.