The Human Trafficking Machine

The Scale of Modern Slavery

The International Labour Organization, the United Nations agency responsible for tracking global labor conditions, published its most recent Global Estimates of Modern Slavery in September 2022. The numbers are the worst ever recorded. An estimated 49.6 million people are trapped in modern slavery on any given day. That figure includes 27.6 million in forced labor, meaning labor extracted through force, fraud, or coercion for the profit of another person.

It includes 22 million in forced marriage, a category the ILO now counts as a form of modern slavery because the victims cannot leave and are subjected to exploitation. The number increased by 10 million between the 2017 and 2022 estimates. Modern slavery is not declining.

It is accelerating.

Of the 27.6 million in forced labor, 17.3 million are exploited in the private economy, including agriculture, construction, manufacturing, domestic work, and the sex industry. An additional 6.3 million are in commercial sexual exploitation, overwhelmingly women and girls. The remaining 3.9 million are in state-imposed forced labor, including prison labor regimes in China, North Korea, and Eritrea.

These are conservative estimates. The ILO acknowledges that its methodology captures only cases where sufficient data exists. The actual number of enslaved people is almost certainly higher.

The economics of modern slavery are staggering. The ILO estimates that forced labor generates $236 billion in annual profits. Sexual exploitation alone accounts for $99 billion of that total, despite representing a smaller share of total victims.

The profit per victim in commercial sexual exploitation in developed economies averages $100,000 per year. In forced labor, the average is $2,500. The disparity explains why sex trafficking attracts the most organized criminal investment, even though labor trafficking enslaves far more people.

A 4,500-Year History

The Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on a basalt stele in approximately 1754 BCE, contains provisions governing the ownership, sale, and punishment of enslaved people. It prescribes the death penalty for anyone who harbors a fugitive slave. Slavery is not an aberration of human civilization.

It is one of its oldest institutions. Every major civilization on every inhabited continent practiced some form of forced labor, debt bondage, or chattel slavery.

Ancient Rome operated on enslaved labor at an industrial scale. At its peak, enslaved people constituted 25 to 40 percent of the population of the Italian peninsula, between two and three million human beings. The slave market on the Greek island of Delos processed an estimated 10,000 enslaved persons per day at its height.

The Arab slave trade, which operated across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Sahara for approximately 13 centuries, trafficked between 10 and 18 million people. None of these systems have fully ended. They evolved.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The transatlantic slave trade, which operated from approximately 1500 to 1867, forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. Approximately 1.8 million died during the Middle Passage, the sea crossing from Africa to the Americas. The first Portuguese slave auction took place in Lagos, Portugal in 1444, when 235 captives from West Africa were sold.

The first enslaved Africans arrived in English North America in 1619, when the ship White Lion docked at Point Comfort, Virginia.

The Zong massacre of 1781 crystallized the moral calculus of the trade. The captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 132 enslaved Africans thrown overboard so the ship's owners could collect insurance on the "lost cargo." The subsequent legal proceedings were not a murder trial. They were an insurance dispute. The court's only question was whether the insurance company was liable for the financial loss.

Abolition and Its Limits

The abolition movement dismantled the legal framework of chattel slavery over the course of the 19th century. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. The United States followed with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888. But abolition ended the legal category, not the practice. Within decades, new systems of forced labor emerged: convict leasing in the American South, indentured servitude across the British Empire (1.5 million Indians transported to Caribbean and Pacific plantations between 1834 and 1920), and the forced labor regime in King Leopold's Congo Free State, where an estimated 10 million people died between 1885 and 1908.