Business is booming for human traffickers because they know they’ll get away with it

Worldwide, 50m people are victims of modern slavery. There should be no hiding place for those pulling the strings

To put the size of the human slavery industry into context, its profits, which are nothing less than blood money, total more than $150bn annually.

More than 200 years after the international slave trade was formally abolished, the terrible truth is there has never been a better time to sell a human life than today. Business is booming for the criminals who engage in human trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery, not just across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, but in mainland Europe and across the Channel into Britain too.

Every day, traffickers are pushing desperate men, women, and children into the hell of modern slavery in the knowledge that their crime is almost cost-free. There should be no hiding place for criminals who trade in people, but the likelihood of criminal exploiters being put behind bars is remote.