Traffickers include those who may recruit, transport, receive, and exploit victims, often using force, threats, or other physical and psychological methods of control.
Traffickers lure victims into exploitative situations by preying on their hopes to improve their lives and the lives of their families. They often promise a chance for a better life – a good job, a loving relationship, or new and exciting opportunities. In other cases, traffickers kidnap victims and use physical and psychological violence to control them, forcing them into labor or sexual exploitation.
Traffickers include a wide range of criminals, including individual pimps, family operations, small businesses, loose-knit decentralized criminal networks, and international organized criminal operations. Traffickers may transport victims across borders or engage in trafficking within one country. Often the traffickers and their victims share the same nationality, allowing the trafficker to better understand and exploit their victims.
Traffickers are driven by two primary factors: high profits and low risk. This combination is driving the explosive spread of trafficking, making it the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world, now second in size only to drugs and arms. The bar to entry into the industry is further lowered by the low start-up capital and skills required to generate profits. In many cases, a trafficker must simply be willing to exploit a vulnerable person and to tap the tremendous demand that exists for cheap labor and commercial sex.
