Virtually every nation in the world is engaged to some extent in this tragic trade, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims. UNICEF estimates that one million children alone are forced, sold, abducted, or coerced into the commercial sex trade annually. Their average age worldwide is 13.
Estimates of women and children trafficked across international borders each year range from 800,000 to four million. In the United States alone, the U.S. State Department estimates that as many as 18,500 men, women, and children are trafficked into the U.S. each year, many for sexual exploitation (2004).
As for profitability, it is estimated that slavery has exploded into a $12 billion a year global industry with sexual trafficking constituting a major part. A girl who is purchased by a trafficker for as little as $150 can be sold to customers as many as ten times a night and can bring in $10,000 a month profit. With minimal expenses, police as co-conspirators, and almost unlimited victims to prey upon, trafficking for sexual exploitation is surpassing the sale of illegal drugs as the preferred industry for criminals. In India, there are approximately 10 million prostitutes, and an estimated 300,000 - 500,000 of them are children. In the city of Mumbai, 90% of the 100,000 women in prostitution are indentured slaves.
For the unlikely few that do attempt to get out, it can take up to fifteen years for them to purchase their freedom. And, the economics behind the freedom are staggering. Typically, a brothel owner or madam (often a woman) receives a paying customer's money up front and then gives the girl her cut which often is quite minimal. To pay for movies, clothes, make up, and extra food to supplement a diet of rice and dal, the girls borrow from moneylenders at an interest rate of 500%. All of these debts make it virtually impossible for the girls to financially secure a life outside of the brothel.
From the poverty-stricken villages of the small nation of Nepal, destitute parents sell 7,000 - 9,000 young daughters a year into sexual slavery. Approximately 160,000 Nepalese women are held in India's brothels. Parents willingly sell their daughters to traffickers to purchase relief from their financial pressures but in exchange their daughters have been given a death sentence.
Out of the economic and moral chaos that followed the USSR's collapse, staggering numbers of young women and girls who live in poverty are being falsely lured into sexual slavery. Estimates suggest that one-third of all sexual trafficking is taking place in nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Young girls are abducted outright in areas of Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria as they walk home from school along back roads. In Moldova in particular, a despicable pattern of trafficking targets the thousands of girls who live in state orphanages. Exploitive traffickers track and follow the exact timing of when sixteen and seventeen year old orphans come of age and are released into independent life. Knowing the orphaned young girls have nowhere to go the traffickers meet them outside as they are leaving the orphanage and promise them a better life. Enslavement follows in brothels in international cities across Western Europe where new sex workers are raped and brutalized until they are driven to submit to their new roles out of despondency. In all of the trafficking schemes, once the new victims' legal papers are submitted into their new bosses' possession, they quickly lose their freedom and any illusions of a better life.