Children who are trafficked for labor purposes might be removed from their families and forced to perform domestic household services, or work in factories or agriculture.
Though millions of children are trafficked, there is a much larger number of children involved in child labor that is not considered trafficking.
There are an estimated 168 million child laborers around the world, with around half of them participating in what is known as “hazardous work” – work that endangers the child’s physical, emotional, or social well-being.
Often traffickers will come to a village claiming to be recruiting employees for a large business or corporation. They promise job training, excellent salaries, and the ability to move into higher positions over time. The young women they lure – generally with their parents’ consent or coercion – leave the village with these traffickers and find that once they are in a big city they are sold to a brothel, or otherwise forced to engage in commercial sex work. If they resist, they risk being beaten, raped, or killed. Alone and in an unfamiliar place, there is nothing they can do.