Late last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) biennial report on human trafficking pointed to a striking shift — female victims appear to be getting younger.
Although adult women still make up the vast majority of trafficking victims detected worldwide, in many regions their numbers fell in 2022 compared to 2019. But the report found the number of girls aged 18 and under detected as victims rose by nearly 40% during the same time period — and more than doubled in North America.
“The average age of the victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation seems to be decreasing,” says Fabrizio Sarrica, a research coordinator at UNODC who has worked on every Trafficking in Persons report since 2009. “The why is the big question mark.”
COVID-19 measures dramatically reduced the opportunities for traffickers to operate and cases dropped off. Yet the numbers detected globally in 2022 rose by 25%, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, according to the UNODC report.
Sarrica and his team analyzed data from 156 countries, reviewing trafficking cases recorded by national authorities. They identified nearly 70,000 victims globally in 2022, with some countries also providing data from 2023, too.
Much like women, the majority of girls were sexually exploited. Other forms included domestic servitude, forced marriage and forced criminality, including shoplifting or fraud.
Most are aged 15 to 17, according to UNODC.
In North America, girls made up 25% of the total victims recorded in 2022, a 7% increase in the numbers detected from 2019. This can largely be attributed to girls trafficked within the same country for sexual exploitation, says Sarrica.
Women, however, made up 56% of the victims in the region – a 9% drop in the same period.
A similar trend is playing out worldwide. Countries in Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East also reported a higher share of girls and lower share of women in detected cases, according to UNODC.
“[The shift] is probably connected to the structure of the market,” explains Sarrica. “[But] we couldn’t find anything that could support any of our hypotheses.”
The data plays into a broader trend of child trafficking, forced labor and forced criminality rising since 2019, according to UNODC.
Although it may partly reflect improved detection capacities and could be skewed by countries, for example, deciding to focus on certain forms of trafficking, it is also likely a “reflection of the fragility we see in every corner of the globe,” said Ghada Waly, executive director of the UNODC.
Women and girls still bear the brunt of the issue, making up the majority of trafficking victims detected worldwide, according to UNODC. They are also likely to suffer explicit or extreme violence three times more than boys and men.
“We go through thousands of cases,” says Sarrica. “And you can see extreme forms of violence to the point of sadism.”
He stresses their data is based on detected cases. These are people who’ve been identified by law enforcement or NGOs and — for better or worse — are known. There are many more who remain hidden.
“The tip of the iceberg is quite big.”