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Saturday, June 14, 2014

Criminal Justice Quote: How Big is Sex Trafficking in the U.S.?

     Estimates of the number of victims of human trafficking in the U.S. vary widely. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has estimated there are between 100,000 and 300,000 child victims of trafficking, though it no longer uses these figures, acknowledging the difficulty in measuring the scope of the problem.

     The Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization founded to combat human trafficking and "modern day slavery," has counted about 14,000 sex trafficking cases in the U.S. over the last six years, based on the number of calls to its national hotline. In 2012, the Department of Justice convicted 138 human traffickers in cases involving forced labor, sex trafficking of adults and sex trafficking of children, compared to 151 convictions in 2011. The majority of the cases involved sex trafficking.

     Human trafficking is a $9.8 billion annual industry in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Shared Hope International organization.

Monica Alba, "Super Bowl Surge in Sex Trafficking? Maybe Not, But Issue Grabs the Spotlight," NBC News, January 29, 2014 

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