How many children are exploited in the world

Some agencies engaged in the recruitment of domestic workers in Asia for rich households in the Middle East and other parts of the world often charge fees to the employers. The employers often make the workers repay the fees — sometimes by withholding documents and refusing to allow the worker to leave until the fee is paid. Illicit profits from trafficking can vary: large criminal organizations make the highest incomes, while small scale traffickers can earn little more than average wage.

There are cases where the illicit income made by traffickers is substantial. These cases relate to large criminal organizations exploiting dozens of victims over years. Investigators estimated that the criminal group made tens of millions of US dollars during five years of activity. But the size of income from trafficking can vary considerably depending on the typologies and organizational structures of the activity.

Dozens of court case summaries analysed by UNODC dealt with relatively low-profit scams, with women and girls sold to their future exploiter for less than 5, USD and intermediaries receiving less than 2, USD. Victims of trafficking within national borders were sold for as little as USD.

Recruiting victims may be no more profitable than an annual average salary in a legitimate business, according to these figures. The market value attached to victims is higher when it reaches the exploitation phase. There are examples where victims were sold for up to 25, USD each in countries where they were going to be exploited.

The case summaries are illustrative of the wide range of profits made by traffickers. Estimating the global size of the trafficking in persons market in terms of illegal profits remains challenging, given the lack of a reliable estimate of the number of victims globally. The analysis shows how little the victims are valued in the illicit market of trafficking. Traffickers trade their victims as commodities. The monetary value traffickers give to victims may be as little as a couple hundred dollars, equivalent to a few grams of methamphetamine.

Traffickers structured in governance-type organized criminal groups tend to use violence more frequently than individual or opportunistic traffickers. The more common pattern followed by traffickers, however, is to employ deceptive or manipulative means — at least during the recruitment phase.

More often during the recruitment phase, traffickers employ deception through fake job advertisements or direct contact with victims pretending they want friendship. Victims are typically exposed to more coercive and often violent situations as they are exploited. Most cases of trafficking within high-income countries involve sexual exploitation of girls or young women. Traffickers often use manipulative methods such as feigning romantic interest for the victims and may not necessarily resort to violence.

Traffickers adapt to technology shifts and exploit through the internet to operate in multiple locations at the same time. Traffickers have kept pace with technology, becoming adept at using the internet for their trafficking operations.

In the early days of the web, they used stand-alone sites, before exploiting the potential of classified ad sites and then moving into social media. The internet helps traffickers to operate in multiple locations simultaneously while physically exploiting the victims in just one location.

The first case of online trafficking recorded by UNODC took place in the early s, when a free-standing webpage was used to connect buyers with local agents. Now, internet-based trafficking spans from the basic advertisement of victims online, to advanced combinations of smartphone apps in integrated business models to recruit victims and transfer profits. Technology is used not only for sexual exploitation but also to coerce victims into crime and forced labour, and to advertise the selling of kidneys harvested from victims they have trafficked.

Internet tools have been integrated into the business models of traffickers at every stage of the process. Hunting involves a trafficker actively pursuing a victim, typically on social media, initially as a friendly introduction that becomes more aggressive as the relationship develops. Fishing strategies involve posting an advertisement and waiting for potential victims to respond, often using advertisements for high-paying or prestigious jobs.

In one case, roughly women were snared by an ad for modelling jobs overseas. The women were required to submit explicit images, before being told they were being recruited for sexual exploitation and blackmailed with the pictures. Fishing strategies can also be used to lure potential clients through advertisements for exploitative services. One court case showed how a single trafficker managed to connect one victim with more than sex buyers over two months using an online ad.

While high proportions of child-trafficking cases involve platforms with higher levels of anonymity such as social media, cases where the victim is an adult are more likely to involve the use of free-standing webpages and other platforms involving open advertisements. Over the last 15 years, the number of detected victims has increased for both females and males, but the number of detected men, boys, and girls has increased more than women so the profile of the victims detected has changed — the share of adult women falling from more than 70 per cent to less than 50 per cent in During the same period, a steady increase in the detection of girl and male victims has been recorded.

Sexual exploitation remains the most common motive for trafficking, but the share of those trafficked for forced labour has grown from 18 per cent to 38 per cent among detected cases. More recently, more victims have been detected for the purpose of forced criminality. Currently, more than 90 per cent of the countries, for which this information is available, criminalize trafficking in line with the UN Trafficking in Persons Protocol.

Globally, the number of people convicted per , population has almost tripled since It helps to protect children at risk, enforce anti-trafficking laws and assist victims in need. Its mission is to address the many factors that cause child trafficking. These include making potential victims less vulnerable, ensuring protection to those who fall prey and catching and prosecuting the criminals involved.

An important part of tackling child trafficking is to make sure there are safe spaces, such as schools, where children can be protected from harm. In times of upheaval and crisis, education is a lifeline. Students in school can get safety information, adult supervision and a higher chance of being identified and documented.

Organisations such as Theirworld are committed to helping provide children in crisis with education. After the devastating earthquakes in , there was a huge increase in the number of girls forced into labour and sexual exploitation in neighbouring countries.

These helped children were off the streets and made them safe from traffickers. There they also learned about how to keep themselves safe and healthy. Jacob, 13, left his village when he was promised an education and a job as a house boy in the city. Instead, the men who took him forced him to hunt for scrap metal to sell and he ended up begging on the streets and stealing.

Parul was married at 14 but her husband abandoned her when she got pregnant. She was tricked by her aunt who offered to find her a job in Dhaka. The aunt took her to Kolkata, India, and sold her to a brothel where she was forced to become a sex worker. The International Labour Organization : A definition of the issue of child labour. World Day against Child Labour : An authoritative explanation on why this day exists.

In the same period, the share of adult men has nearly doubled, from around 10 per cent to 20 per cent in Overall, 50 per cent of detected victims were trafficked for sexual exploitation, 38 per cent were exploited for forced labour, six per cent were subjected to forced criminal activity, while one per cent were coerced into begging and smaller numbers into forced marriages, organ removal, and other purposes.

In , most women and girls detected were trafficked for sexual exploitation, whereas men and boys were mainly trafficked for forced labour. The share of detected victims trafficked for forced labour has steadily increased for more than a decade. Victims are exploited across a wide range of economic sectors, particularly in those where work is undertaken in isolated circumstances including agriculture, construction, fishing, mining, and domestic work. Globally, most persons prosecuted and convicted of trafficking in persons continue to be male, with around 64 and 62 per cent respectively.

Offenders can be members of organized crime groups, which traffic the great majority of victims, to individuals operating on their own or in small groups on an opportunistic basis. Traffickers see their victims as commodities without regard for human dignity and rights.

They sell fellow human beings for a price that can range from tens of US dollars to tens of thousands, with large criminal organizations making the highest incomes. Traffickers have integrated technology into their business model at every stage of the process, from recruiting to exploiting victims.