Human trafficking is big business. It generates profits of nearly $150 billion annually. Yet because it is a black market activity, it is extremely difficult to track.

The 2016 Global Slavery Index, recently issued by The Walk Free Foundation, estimates there are 45.8 million victims of human trafficking worldwide—nearly 10 million more than estimated in the 2015 report. Andrew Forrest, the foundation’s founder, attributes the apparent increase in victims to improved methodology and to global instability that increases vulnerabilities to human trafficking. According to the Index, Asia remains a hotbed of human trafficking. Fifty-eight percent of all human trafficking victims live in just five Asian countries: India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan. India alone is estimated to have more than 18 million victims, and at least four percent of North Korea’s population is enslaved.

The Index has come under fire for having questionable methodology. The Walk Free Foundation collaborates with Gallup, conducting twenty-five surveys and interviewing over 42,000 people, to compile the data from which it extrapolates to make its estimates. But at the very least, it represents a good-faith effort to quantify the problem. And Walk Free’s work is needed. Despite sixteen years of concerted anti-trafficking efforts—there is still no reliable, comprehensive governmental data source on human trafficking.

 

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