You can be sex trafficked through live sex acts such as prostitution or pornography. Some people have their bodies sold on the Internet for sex, and some are traded within an insider network. Others are employed in places like nail salons and massage parlors. But like labor trafficking, victims of sex trafficking are isolated from others, live in dangerous conditions (often with their employer), and are threatened if they try to leave.

It’s important to remember that sex trafficking isn’t the same as sex work. Others may exploit sex work, and sex workers can enter dangerous situations. But sex work is fundamentally different as a profession chosen (out of desire or out of desperate circumstances) with willing engagement. Prostitution is still a crime in every U.S. state except for Nevada, which can make sex workers more likely to be victimized by human trafficking: a trafficker can threaten to report a victim with a history of willing sex work just as they can an undocumented immigrant.

Many victims of sex trafficking are women and children, but some men are sex trafficked as well. Some risk factors that put children at a higher risk of sex trafficking are unique, including:⁹

• Child abuse
• Caregiver strain (a caregiver unable to fully provide for a child)
• Running away
• Substance use
• Peer involvement in trafficking
• Witnessing violence
• Poverty
• Difficulty in school
• Conflict with parents
• Poor mental health
• Prior rape or adolescent sexual victimization

The average age of a sex-trafficked minor is between 11 and 14.¹⁰ Studies have found that sex trafficking occurs more often in places close to interstate highways with high concentrations of low-cost hotels or motels, more adult-oriented stores, and economically disadvantaged residents.¹¹

Human trafficking isn’t just something that happens to impoverished young women in non-Western countries. It can happen to anyone regardless of gender, age, class, and nationality.

Any oppressed status or feature that makes a person vulnerable to exploitation increases the risk of human trafficking, as a trafficker can (and often will) leverage that status against their victims. For example, a trafficker holds power over an undocumented immigrant in a forced labor setting in the United States by telling the victim that if they complain about their work, they’ll be reported to ICE and deported. This fear then keeps the victim from seeking help.

Other features that make you more vulnerable to human trafficking include:¹²

• Mental health struggles
• Substance abuse
• Recent migration or relocation
• Being unhoused
• Involvement in foster care and the child welfare system

Some groups are at higher risk than others. Women are more likely to be victims of human trafficking, as an estimated 65% of victims were female in 2018 (both adults and children, down from 84% in 2004). Women are also more likely to be sex trafficked than men.¹³ And because financial incentives are a standard method of tricking someone into exploitative labor practices, impoverished individuals are significantly more likely to be trafficked than those in financially stable situations. Those who lack community support or close relationships may be easily lured by a trafficker’s promises of stability.

We’ll dive into a few other groups below at the highest risk of victimization.

Runaway and homeless youth

Runaway and homeless youth are at a particularly high risk of being trafficked. About 10% of young people aged 18-25 experience some kind of homelessness over twelve months, as do one in 30 teenagers aged 13-17.¹⁴ Minority youth are even more likely to be homeless, particularly when it comes to non-white LGBTQ+ youth. According to the Trevor Project’s 2021 survey, 28% of LGBTQ+ youth reported experiencing homelessness or housing instability at some point; the number skyrockets to:

• 44% of Indigenous LGBTQ+ youth
• 39% for transgender boys
• 38% of transgender girls
• 36% for multiracial LGBTQ+ youth.¹⁵

Put together, that’s a massive number of children at risk, considering that one in five runaway and homeless youth become victims of human trafficking.¹⁶

Indigenous women and girls

According to the Immigration and Human Rights Law Review through the University of Cincinnati, Indigenous people comprise about 1.1% of the United States population but account for 25% of all human trafficking cases.¹⁷ Indigenous women and girls are at a considerable disadvantage in terms of both material resources and social support. They often have limited access to resources or organizations that can identify and assist victims.⁸ And because of stereotypes about Indigenous communities and discrimination, law enforcement can miss the signs of trafficking that would be clear in other circumstances.

It’s such an extreme situation that in 2016, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 missing Indigenous women and girls, but the U.S. Department of Justice only registered 116 cases.¹⁸

Not all murdered and missing Indigenous women are trafficked — according to the CDC, Indigenous women are ten times more likely to be murdered than women of other ethnicities.¹⁹ But a 2016 National Institute of Justice study found that 84.3% of Indigenous women have experienced physical violence in their lifetimes.²⁰ Considering that poverty, substance abuse, a lack of community support, and a history of abuse increase one’s risk of being trafficked, it’s clear that Indigenous women and girls are at high risk.

Migrant and seasonal agricultural workers

Despite how critical agricultural workers are for our food system (and, therefore, our society), non-resident agricultural workers are highly likely to be trafficked. There have been several significant stories of labor trafficking among U.S. migrant and seasonal farmworkers in 2022 based on exploitative loopholes in agricultural visa programs. Migrant and seasonal workers are those who legally travel across international borders for a brief time to work but don’t move from their permanent residence in another country. Despite several protections like the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA), agricultural work is full of labor trafficking.

Migrant and seasonal agricultural work is a strong entry point for child labor trafficking and debt bondage, according to a 2022 report from the United Nations Human Rights commission.²¹ Polaris reports regularly receiving many calls from migrant and seasonal workers, adding up to more than 4,800 trafficked individuals. The ubiquity of human trafficking in these groups can be attributed to:

• Language barriers
• Lack of knowledge about legal (and illegal) fees and recruitment practices
• Temporary work visa programs²²

Human traffickers take advantage of and exploit vulnerable people. But how do you know whether or not someone is being trafficked? And how do you know if you’re at risk? We’ll help you identify the signs — and bust myths around how human traffickers pick their victims.

In victims

You might notice some signs as a bystander or observer if someone is being trafficked. These signs aren’t unique to human trafficking; some may even be innocuous on their own, but displaying many of these may prompt a check-in.

• Signs of physical abuse (cuts, bruises, burn marks)
• Unexplained absences from work or class
• Overly tired
• Withdrawn, depressed, or otherwise “checked out”
• Acting submissive or fearful
• Answers to questions about well-being appear scripted, rehearsed, or forced
• A new tattoo, particularly of an unfamiliar name, money symbol, or barcode
• Sudden change in financial status

Some more serious red flags include:

• Living with an employer
• Employer holds their identity documents
• Unpaid or paid very little
• Working in dangerous conditions
• Feeling pressured to stay in an unsafe employment situation
• Being threatened with harm to themselves, family, or friends if they leave
• Very poor living conditions (such as having multiple people in a cramped space)
• An inability to speak with them alone
• Children and teenagers who engage in prostitution or sex work

Take note if you see several of these signs in someone you know or regularly see out and about. They may be in a dangerous situation as a potential victim of human trafficking.

On the Internet

The rise of the Internet has created even more opportunities for human trafficking. The dark web allows traffickers to buy and sell their victims while evading law enforcement, rendering these transactions virtually untraceable.³¹ Introducing cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, has only complicated this matter. Between 15% and 27% of all websites that sell sexual acts accept cryptocurrency as payment, which makes it even more difficult to trace who’s purchased a human being.³² In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice seized the largest online platform used for sex trafficking, backpage.com, which fragmented the market and targeted between $83.4 and $91.8 million.³³

Two laws were passed in 2018 to curb online sex trafficking — the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), often referred to as FOSTA-SESTA. However, they’ve mostly led to stricter pornography and non-traffic sex work bans on the Internet (particularly on social media). FOSTA-SESTA claimed to shut down 90% of online sex trafficking advertisements after its adoption. Upon further research, that number quickly returned to 75% of the original figure (meaning it ultimately only shut down 25% of sex trafficking advertisements).³⁴ Creating laws to protect people from human and sex trafficking is important, but FOSTA-SESTA may not be the only answer.

Trafficking itself isn’t the only thing that happens on the Internet. Traffickers can use their victim’s social media accounts to recruit new people for human trafficking and control the appearance of their victims, essentially covering their tracks. While social media can be a source of good, connecting vulnerable populations with a community that can support them, those same vulnerabilities leave them prey to human traffickers.³⁵ A trafficker might also continue running their victim’s social media accounts, posting statuses, sharing pictures, and commenting on others’ posts to fake normalcy.