Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery, with illegal smuggling and trading of people (including minors), for forced labor or sexual exploitation.

Trafficking is officially defined as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by means of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, or abuse of power from a position of vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation. Human trafficking dates just far as back as slavery if not farther.^[1] What has been referred to as the modern slavery has approximately 4.8 million victims a year worldwide and 51% of that approximate total is women and 20% being young girls.^[2] Human trafficking is not synonymous with forced migration or smuggling.^[3] They span a wide age range. Sex trafficking victims up to roughly 25 years old most often started as young as 14. In the United States, human trafficking tends to occur around international travel-hubs with large immigrant populations, notably California, Texas and Georgia. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 35,500–170,500 people enter illegally into the country every year. The 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates that including U.S. citizens and immigrants 57,700 people across the world are victims of human trafficking.^[4] Those being trafficked include young children, teenagers, men and women and can be domestic citizens or foreign nationals.