According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), "Human Trafficking is a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transfering, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them. Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. Every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims. UNODC, as guardian of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the Protocols thereto, assists States in their efforts to implement the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (Trafficking in Persons Protocol)."

The United States is not immune to human trafficking. According to USA Today's article, "Human Trafficking is a Growing Crime in the U.S," almost half of the cases involve children. In January 2012 President Obama made January, "National Human Trafficking Awareness Month."

On 25 September 2012, President Obama made the following statement:



“It ought to concern every person, because it’s a debasement of our common humanity.  It ought to concern every community, because it tears at the social fabric.  It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets.  It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime.  I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name—modern slavery.”

According to Half The Sky's website, "With millions of women and girls bound in the international sex trade, sex trafficking has earned a fitting epithet: modern-day slavery.

It's difficult to estimate just how many women and girls are impacted by sex trafficking, in part because you can't easily divide sex workers into those who are working voluntarily and involuntarily. But in their book Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn estimate that around 3 million women and girls (and a small number of boys) worldwide are currently enslaved in the sex trade — bought, held and forced into commercial sex work against their will. This figure may even be on the conservative side, as it doesn't account for people who were intimidated into prostitution or the millions more under 18 who can't consent to working in brothels.

The U.S. State Department's tally is lower, with estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Eighty percent of those trafficked are women and girls, mostly for sexual exploitation. But these figures overlook the millions more victims who are trafficked annually within their own national borders." There's a film out, too (same title).