How many people are trafficked in the United States? We don’t know. There is no reliable estimate for the number of trafficking victims in America. We don’t know how many people are trafficked and we don’t know where the hot spots for trafficking are in the United States. We don’t know any of this data for any type of trafficking in the United States whether it involves adults or children, sex or labor.
While we do not yet know a reliable estimate for the number of trafficking victims in the United States; there is general agreement about global estimates for human trafficking.
The International Labor Organization estimated there were:
40.3 Million
Victims of modern slavery globally in 2017
Modern slavery is an umbrella term that includes human trafficking. (Reference ILO, 2017.)
There is no single resource to track cases of human trafficking; however these two resources provide additional information:
Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative
Attempts to combine data for cases around the world
Polaris Project
Tracks the number of survivors in the United States who contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline