Slavery today

Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries during the transatlantic slave trade. In 2021, an estimated 50 million people – almost four times that figure – were living in some form of modern slavery, 10 million more than in 2016. 

Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all enslaved persons worldwide.

According to the abolitionist group Anti-Slavery International, someone is considered enslaved today if they:

• Are forced to work against their will;

• Are owned or controlled by an exploiter or “employer”; 

• Have limited freedom of movement; and/or 

• Are dehumanized, treated as a commodity, or bought and sold as property.

Globally, more than half of the 40.3 million victims of enslavement are in forced labor, which means they are working against their will and under threat, intimidation, or coercion. An additional 15.4 million people are estimated to be living in forced marriages.

Of the 24.9 million people trapped in forced labor, the majority (16 million) work in the private sector. They clean houses and apartments; produce the clothes we wear; pick the fruit and vegetables we eat; trawl the seas for the shrimp on our restaurant plates; dig for the minerals used in our smartphones, makeup, and electric cars; and work on construction jobs. 

Another 4.8 million people – 99% of them women and girls – are sexually exploited in the commercial sex industry. Roughly 4.1 million people are in state-sanctioned forced labor, which includes governmental abuse of military conscription and forced construction or agricultural work. 

Statistically, modern slavery is most prevalent in Asia and the Pacific. Country-by-country rankings published by Walk Free's Global Slavery Index put North Korea at the top, followed by Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye. But not a single nation is untainted by slavery: 1.5 million victims are in industrialized countries, with more than 400,000 people estimated to be living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States.

Slavery is still big business. Globally, slavery generates as much as $150 billion in profits every year, almost a third of it ($46.9 billion) in industrialized countries. According to Siddharth Kara, an expert on contemporary slavery and child labor, modern slave traders now earn up to 30 times more than their 18th and 19th century counterparts would have done. The estimated one-off cost of a slave today is $450. A forced laborer generates roughly $8,000 in annual profit for their exploiter, while sex traffickers earn an average of $36,000 per victim.

Most of the above information about modern-day slavery is drawn from this February 25, 2019 article in The Guardian newspaper.