Today, an estimated 50 million people are living in modern slavery. Approximately 28 million are trapped in forced labor, including 3.3 million children. More than half of those children are being commercially sexually exploited.
For perspective, approximately 12.5 million captive Africans were forced onto ships during more than three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. Modern slavery holds roughly four times that number of people at this very moment—not across centuries, but today.
Its most profitable form is sexual exploitation.
Forced labor generates an estimated $236 billion in illegal profit every year. Nearly $173 billion comes from commercial sexual exploitation alone. A human being can be sold once. A child’s body can be sold repeatedly. That is the horrifying economic logic beneath the crime.
The United States does not stand outside this system. Children are recruited, advertised, purchased and exploited here—often through the same platforms where the rest of us share photographs, build identities and consume entertainment.
In 2012, the national CyberTipline received approximately 415,000 reports of online child sexual exploitation. By 2022, that number had exceeded 32 million. In 2023, the volume approached 100,000 reports every day. These reports do not represent 100,000 individual children—but their acceleration reveals an infrastructure of abuse expanding faster than society’s capacity to confront it.
A 2024 U.S. Senate hearing documented how social platforms can become tools for grooming, blackmail, trafficking and the endless circulation of child sexual-abuse material. Senators described recommendation systems that made abusive material easier for predators to discover, companies earning billions from the attention of minors, and legal protections that have made accountability extraordinarily difficult.
Technology did not create the desire to exploit children. It gave that desire global reach, instant distribution and unprecedented scale.
We did not abolish the marketplace. We allowed it to become digital, invisible and extraordinarily profitable.
Behind every number is one child waiting for the adults, agencies and institutions around them to finally act as though their life matters.
This is not a hidden world. It is a world we have trained ourselves not to see.
Once we know, looking away becomes a choice.
From awareness to action
Justice for Women International is building the human infrastructure required to turn outrage into protection.
Under Daphna Edwards Ziman’s leadership, it has brought together 17 First Ladies from across Africa, alongside leaders in government, law, business, media and philanthropy, around a shared commitment to end trafficking and violence against women and children.
Most recently, the organization welcomed Sierra Leone’s First Lady, H.E. Fatima Maada Bio, whose Hands Off Our Girls movement helped drive a historic national law prohibiting marriage under eighteen.
Through advocacy, international coordination and the vision for Every Girl’s City—a safe, self-sustaining community providing housing, food, water, education, healing and meaningful work—Justice for Women International is creating more than rescue.
It is creating the conditions in which exploitation can no longer reclaim the child.
This is what real change looks like: protection written into law, safety built into communities and powerful women standing together so that no girl stands alone.
Your contribution can help transform visibility into legislation, vulnerability into safety and survival into a future.
Stand with the women changing the system. Protect the girls it was built to overlook.
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