Support for Survivors of Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is a crime that involves the exploitation of a person for the purpose of coerced sex or labor. Traffickers utilize force, fraud, and coercion to control individuals and profit from them.

Labor Trafficking

Labor trafficking, or forced labor, most often begins with a simple job offer. It becomes trafficking when pay or working conditions are abusive and the worker cannot quit or complain because the boss is threatening them or exploiting their desperate economic circumstances. Kidnapping or physical force is rarely part of how labor trafficking situations begin.

Federal Definition: Forced labor is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. (United States Department of Justice, 2025)

Sex Trafficking

Traffickers target vulnerable people who have needs that the traffickers can fill. People in sex trafficking situations sometimes know and even trust or love their traffickers. Sometimes traffickers offer material support – a place to live, clothing or other basic needs. Other times, they offer love, emotional support, protection or a sense of belonging. Kidnapping victims and forcing them into the sex trade through violence is rare.

Federal Definition: Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age. (United States Department of Justice, 2025)

This list can help you recognize if you or someone you know is being trafficked/exploited.

• Are you forced or pressured to trade sex for money or to have sex with people you don't want to?
• Are you getting paid for all of the work that you do?
• Is your job different from what you were promised?
• Did someone trap you in a job?
• Were you tricked into running away or leaving your home?
• Is your ID or other documentation being held by someone else?
• Are you afraid to leave?

You deserve to be safe and unharmed, no matter what you may have been told.

Vulnerability Due to Social Conditions or Lived Identities/Experiences

Traffickers exploit vulnerabilities that individuals possess, such as:

• Have an unstable living situation
• Have previously experienced other forms of violence, such as sexual abuse or domestic violence
• Have been involved in the child welfare or youth justice system and/or missing from home or care
• Are undocumented immigrants
• Are facing poverty or economic need
• Have a caregiver or family member who has a substance use issue
• Are an individual who is struggling with a substance use concern
• Living with a disability
• LGBTQIA+