Human Trafficking Fueling Modern Day Slavery

For most Americans, being carried across a border into sexual servitude sounds like the plot of a film. For an estimated tens of millions of people it is ordinary life, and the business behind it — recruitment, transport, debt, and sale — is worth more than $150 billion a year. It is also, its practitioners have learned, remarkably low-risk.

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with R. Evon Idahosa, a former New York law firm partner who left practice to found Pathfinders Justice Initiative, an organization combating sex trafficking in her native Nigeria, for a conversation about how the trade works, why the law has struggled to slow it, and what a survivor's road back looks like.

"Ask Me Whether What I Have Done Is My Life"

Idahosa begins with her own exit: fourteen years in practice, a partnership, and a line from a poem read on a Friday night that sent her into her senior partner's office with a resignation on Monday. Her work since has focused on Edo State in southern Nigeria, which sends more women into trafficking outside Africa — mostly to Italy and Spain — than any other place on the continent. One in three women there, she says, has been approached by a recruiter; sixty percent of the population lives below the poverty line; and a graduate with an excellent record may earn less than a barista in New York. That, not ignorance, is the engine.

Bait, Switch, and Debt

The legal definition of trafficking, Idahosa explains, is broader than the popular image of abduction at gunpoint: it reaches harboring and transferring as well as transporting, requires no border crossing, and turns on force, fraud, or coercion for profit. In Edo the instrument is fraud. The offer is a hairdressing job in Europe; the reality on arrival is a debt that has multiplied several times over, a confiscated passport, and years of forced sex work to pay it down. Most recruits, she notes, know what sex trafficking is — 97 percent in her home state — and many, along with their parents, believe it is something one can do for a year or two and come home. The recruiters are often women who once made the same journey and rose to become "madames," and sometimes they are relatives: Idahosa tells the story of "Tina," recruited at seventeen by her own aunt, held for two and a half years in Spain and Italy, beaten when she tried to escape, and returned to Nigeria at twenty with HIV, where a helpline number led her to Pathfinders' medical care and a trade-school placement.

Why the Law Has Not Caught Up

Idahosa gives three reasons the trade persists despite a UN protocol adopted by more than 130 countries and federal legislation in the United States dating to 2000. Demand: men who buy women and, by her count, two million children. Money: a $150 billion industry. And risk: unlike drug smuggling, there is no contraband to seize, a victim can be introduced as a cousin, and the victim's own apparent consent — to travel, to a job — blurs the line between trafficking and smuggling in the eyes of police. Penalties have lagged as well. In New York, she observes, a man who paid a child for sex faced a lighter sentence than one who committed statutory rape; a bill she worked on through the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition to equalize them had just passed the Assembly.

The Nordic Model and the American Reality

Her prescription is to attack demand. The Nordic model — criminalizing the purchase of sex while decriminalizing its sale — has, she argues, cut demand in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland and taken those countries off the sex-tourism map, while moving the women involved out of the shadow of criminality. She is skeptical of blanket legalization, favoring regulation and services, and she insists the problem is not foreign: California, Texas, Florida, and New York lead the country in trafficking victims, and by one estimate two thousand children are trafficked in New York State every night. The conversation closes on the T visa, the federal immigration protection for trafficking victims that Idahosa credits with giving undocumented survivors a reason to come forward, and on the helplines and public education without which most never will.

What to Know Now

The bill Idahosa was working on became law. New York's Trafficking Victims Protection and Justice Act, signed in October 2015, created the felony offenses of aggravated patronizing a minor, aligned their penalties with statutory rape, raised sex trafficking to a violent felony, and expanded victim protections. Congress passed the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act the same year, adding a $5,000 special assessment on convicted traffickers to fund victim services and clarifying that buyers can be prosecuted as traffickers, and in 2018 enacted FOSTA-SESTA, which removed online platforms' immunity for knowingly facilitating sex trafficking. The T visa she describes was substantially reformed by a 2024 Department of Homeland Security rule that clarified eligibility and eased the evidentiary burden on survivors. The demand-side approach she advocates has spread: France, Ireland, and Israel adopted versions of the Nordic model, and in 2023 Maine became the first American state to decriminalize the sale of sex while retaining penalties for buyers. Nigeria enacted a strengthened federal anti-trafficking statute in 2015 and Edo State its own trafficking law and task force in 2018, in the wake of the mass repatriations of Nigerian women from Libyan detention that drew global attention to the Edo–Europe route. The global numbers have grown rather than shrunk: the International Labour Organization now estimates 50 million people in modern slavery, including 27.6 million in forced labor, and illegal profits of $236 billion a year. Of the Chibok schoolgirls, most have been freed or escaped, but dozens remain unaccounted for. Idahosa herself was named a Trafficking in Persons Report Hero by the U.S. State Department in 2023 and now advises Nigeria's National Assembly, the Edo State government, and the United Kingdom Home Office; Pathfinders reports having served more than 5,500 survivors.