With estimates on the conservative side, over 27 million people
throughout the world are enslaved through trafficking." One of the
problems inherent to human trafficking is how vastly underreported it is,
because estimates are based on official cases reported and many human
trafficking victims have fallen under the data-collection radar. Within
the United States around 12% of the victims are children, and the
number of child victims of trafficking has increased from 2008 to 2010.'6
Conceptions of human trafficking commonly evoke images of third-world
women exploited in sexual servitude, however the range of victims and
circumstances of entrapment are much broader. Traffickin7 is most
frequently conceptualized as divided between labor trafficking and sex
trafficking, although this distinction does not capture the complexity of
victims' situations, as many victims of labor trafficking are also subject to
sexual abuse by their traffickers. Other forms of trafficking exist,
including the trafficking of persons for organ removal, begging,
involuntary marriage, and more