What to know about human trafficking this World Day Against Trafficking in Persons

Human trafficking is a crime committed by criminal networks against vulnerable individuals. While traffickers and exploitative actors must be held accountable, trafficking is also a human rights issue rooted in inequality and failures in protection systems.

For World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, we explore what trafficking looks like, why it happens, and why ending it requires more than criminal prosecutions alone.

Human trafficking is defined by exploitation, not movement

Human trafficking is often associated with the notion that people need to be moved across borders to be considered trafficked. But under international law, trafficking is defined by exploitation, not movement.

The Palermo Protocol defines trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of people through threats or use of force, coercion, deception, abuse of a position of vulnerability, or other prohibited means for the purpose of exploitation. A person can be trafficked within their own community, country, or region. What matters is not where someone is taken, but whether they were exploited.

Trafficking takes many forms

When a human is trafficked, it can be for many reasons, and it can look different depending on the situation. Trafficking can be for sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude, or forced criminality, among other things. Often these forms of exploitation are interconnected, and many survivors have experienced multiple forms of exploitation once trafficked.

While people of all genders can experience trafficking, women and girls are disproportionately affected by trafficking for sexual exploitation. Sex trafficking also exists within a broader continuum of gender-based violence, where inequality, discrimination, and harmful social norms can increase vulnerability to exploitation.

Traffickers exploit inequality

Trafficking is interconnected with a broader continuum of gender-based violence and exploitation. Traffickers exploit existing vulnerabilities created by inequality and lack of protection. Often, by the time a woman or girl is trafficked, countless opportunities to prevent it have already been missed.

Poverty, limited access to education, gender-based violence, discrimination, weak labour protections, and economic insecurity can all create conditions that traffickers manipulate. Climate-related disasters, conflict, and displacement can further increase risks by disrupting livelihoods and support systems.

While these factors do not cause trafficking, they create opportunities for traffickers to exploit. 

Technology is changing the way exploitation happens

Technology has presented new means for knowledge sharing, communication, and connection,  and if misused, it creates new tools for exploitation.

Traffickers increasingly use digital platforms to groom, recruit, manipulate, and exploit victims. Emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, deepfake technology, and digitally generated sexual abuse material, are creating new forms of harm while legal protections and accountability mechanisms struggle to keep pace.

Addressing trafficking today requires understanding how exploitation evolves and ensuring that technology companies, governments, and policymakers take responsibility for preventing abuse.

Addressing trafficking as part of a broader human rights approach

At Equality Now, we work to strengthen laws and systems that can prevent trafficking and protect those at risk of exploitation. We use international law and standards to advance legal reform and implementation, pursue accountability through strategic litigation, and advocate through international and regional human rights mechanisms. 

While international standards recognise that governments must prevent trafficking, protect survivors, provide access to services, prosecute traffickers, and address the conditions that allow exploitation to occur, no single law, institution, or sector can end trafficking alone. 

Governments must implement and enforce laws, while civil society, journalists, educators, labour actors, healthcare providers, technology companies, and international and regional human rights bodies all have a role in preventing exploitation and ensuring survivors can access justice and support. Human trafficking is a global emergency that demands coordinated action across sectors. 

It is time to stop treating trafficking in isolation and address the inequalities, systems, and failures that allow exploitation to happen.