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Human Trafficking as a National Security Issue 

Chloe Tymoszenko 

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign  

 

 

Abstract 
Human trafficking is an issue in almost every country across the world and yet it is often 
overlooked by those in the national security field. Funds from human trafficking are directly 
used to fund illicit activities like terrorism or organized crime syndicates while trafficking 
threatens human security by stealing the rights of individuals to their freedom. Furthermore, in 
the age of social media, the threat of human trafficking has spread online to vulnerable groups 
who normally would never have been exposed to this danger. Sadly, rather than tackle the threat 
head on, media companies have avoided taking precautions against human trafficking and opted 
to take no responsibility for the crimes committed on their sites. This, in combination with the 
overlooking of human trafficking as an issue of national security by those in power, has led to a 
network of over 25 million people being trafficked each year. In order to stop the cycle of 
trafficking, social media companies, government officials, and the general public must work 
together to raise awareness of the issues and to help rescue people from trafficking networks.   
  



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Human trafficking is modern day slavery that has evolved at alarming rate in the age of 
technology. Globally, it is one of the largest organized crime operations that generates billions of 
dollars in revenue through the exploitation of others. The backgrounds of those who are 
trafficked and the fields to which they are forced into are varied, making it difficult for the 
international community to combat. In recent years, the rise of social media has generated new 
ways for traffickers to find and communicate with potential victims. Therefore, by understanding 
the issue of human trafficking and the role social media has played within it, policy makers can 
create new legislation and prioritize trafficking as a national security issue.  
 Traditional scholars of national security have failed to adequately address human 
trafficking as a major security issue. According to the department of Homeland security, 
“Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or 
commercial sex act.” When states ignore human trafficking as a national security issue in favor 
of other threats, they are overlooking a vital matter of human security. According to Roza Pati at 
the University of Miami, human security is, “people-centered and emphasizes the idea of 
shielding people from pervasive threats while empowering them to develop resilience to 
adversity” (Pati, 2014). Essentially, these are the issues that individuals are more likely to see as 
threats to their own security. They include: protection from hunger, crime, unemployment, 
disease, environmental hazards, and civil and political unrest. What the government and groups 
who study national security see as important to security, such as nuclear weapons or terrorism, 
are important, but are not something that people are likely to encounter in their daily lives. In 
most countries terrorism accounts for less than 0.01% of deaths and the last nuclear bomb ever 
dropped in combat was in 1945 (Ritchie, Hasell, Appel, & Roser, 2013). Overall, the likelihood 
of becoming victim to or interacting with someone being trafficked is much higher, yet these 
other threats are discussed more often by the news media and scholars. Therefore, human 
trafficking should be considered a major threat to national security because it is a more prevalent 
threat to human security and rights.   

There are many different types of trafficking to which a diverse range of people can 
become victims to. According to estimates, nearly 25 million people globally are under some 
form of trafficking. Victims of human trafficking spend an average of 20 months in forced labor 
with nearly 74% of victims working outside of their home country (HumanrightsFirst.org, 2017). 
In total, trafficking is an estimated $150 billion-dollar global business that encompasses about 25 
different ways people can be trafficked (HumanrightsFirst.org, 2017). These include being 
trafficked into hospitality, construction, prostitution, food service, domestic work, 
manufacturing, or working in bars and strip clubs. Overall, these types of human trafficking can 
be broken up into two major sects which are labor trafficking and sex trafficking.  

According to the United States’ Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 human labor 
trafficking 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, debt bondage, or slavery” (Human Trafficking Laws and Regulations, 
2017). The Department of State estimates that over four million people annually are trafficked 

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for labor in the United States into industries like agriculture, carnival work, commercial cleaning 
services, construction, factory work and more. The most common way for people to be recruited 
into labor trafficking is by in-person recruitment (Anthony, 2018). However, in recent years, 
some traffickers have moved to gaining new victims by posting brazen photos or videos showing 
large amounts of cash or falsified adverts for jobs on social media. Once a vulnerable person 
looking for a job is located, a trafficker will usually offer this person work in a different state or 
country where they will be dependent on their trafficker for support. These victims are 
oftentimes forced to work for little or no money with no way of escaping their situation 
(Anthony, 2018).  

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) reports that children are also 
major targets for the labor trafficking industry. A common way for this to happen is for teenagers 
to be recruited for street peddling. Most minors being trafficked have never worked before, so it 
is common for them to not understand the illegality of their “jobs.” Minors are often tricked into 
working long hours, receiving little pay, and having no access to basic provisions while they are 
forced to work alone in unsafe locations. If they do not sell what they were supposed to, their 
traffickers will often abandon them in these dangerous situations. According to the DHHS, 
“many parents are also unaware of these dangers and believe they are allowing their children to 
work for respected and legitimate companies” (Clawson, Dutch, Solomon, & Grace, 2017).  

The other major type of human trafficking is sex trafficking, which is the most profitable 
form of trafficking. Sex trafficking is defined by US law as, “when a commercial sex act is 
induced by force, fraud, or coercion.” An estimate 4.8 million people are victims of sex 
trafficking, making up only 19% of the total amount of people trafficked, yet it accounts for 66% 
of the global profits (HumanRightsFirst.org, 2017). On average, a woman forced into the sex 
trade will make their trafficker about $100,000 a year, which is six times more than the average 
labor trafficking victim (HumanrightsFirst.org, 2017). Additionally, information from Equality 
Now, a nongovernmental organization that works to help advance the rights of women, says that 
nearly 96% of sex trafficking victims are women. Sex trafficking is typically the most difficult 
for people to escape from because victims are usually extremely vulnerable and have a hard time 
getting support. The DHHS attempted to find the commonalties among those who become sex 
trafficked and found that many of them came from disadvantaged communities where there were 
few economic opportunities (Clawson, Dutch, Solomon, & Grace, 2017). A very common 
scenario for sex trafficking is that the victims are promised economic incentives that usually 
involve moving, sometimes internationally, to more developed areas or nations like the United 
States. Once they arrive, their traffickers work to keep them in the business by destroying their 
legal paperwork, threatening their families or keeping them bound by debt while isolating them 
from their past lives.  

In addition, many people being trafficked in the sex industry are minors. With nearly one 
in six minors being trafficking under the age of twelve (Bouché, 2018). These individuals usually 
come from broken homes where other family members were sexually abusive, addicted to drugs, 
or separated due to loss of a parent in death, divorce, or abandonment (Clawson, Dutch, 



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Solomon, & Grace, 2017). Another risk factor for minors becoming trafficked is if they are 
runaways. Minors who run away from their families, treatment centers, or foster homes are at a 
higher risk of being taken in by traffickers. Finally, people who are exploited in the sex trade are 
more likely to be people of color, especially those living below the poverty line (Lehman, 2017). 
For these reasons, it is important for policy makers to prioritize informing these high-risk groups 
about the dangers of human trafficking. People are much more likely to fall victim to a threat 
they do not see coming, so it is imperative that these groups are informed of the danger. 
Spreading awareness can be done through presentations in schools for young students as well as 
though media campaigns. In 2019, the Department of Homeland security added the Blue 
Campaign to its website, which has aimed to promote national awareness for human trafficking 
by working with law enforcement, the private sector and NGOs to teach people how to identify 
victims (Blue Campaign, 2019). The Blue Campaign, which started in 2010, has pushed for 
greater awareness and is working to help victims.  

In recent years, the rise of social media has given traffickers new platforms such as 
Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter to find and stalk potential victims. According to the 
Polaris study on how social media has affected human trafficking, “trafficking by an individual– 
generally a pimp or an intimate partner– often begins with the trafficker and potential victim 
building a relationship through social media” (Anthony, 2018). The trafficker is likely to start 
small by liking a person’s photos and commenting on their posts. As time goes on, they will 
progress to direct messaging their victims and eventually into what they call boyfriending. In this 
phase, the trafficker will attempt to flatter their potential victim by faking a romantic attraction or 
offering them jobs in a field like modeling. Finally, they will offer to meet each other and that is 
when the person will often be taken and forced into labor or sex trafficking (Anthony, 2018).  

This new way to find victims is making trafficking even more dangerous for human 
security. People who would never have encountered traffickers in their daily lives are 
unknowingly opening themselves up to becoming victims, which is especially worrisome when 
thought about in the context of minors. Lauren Hersh, an expert in sex trafficking, talked about 
the prevalence of targeting minors when trafficking via social media. “In pretty much every 
situation of trafficking I’ve seen unfold there’s some element of social media, whether it’s 
someone being recruited or advertised” (Lehman, 2017). She explains that young girls are more 
susceptible to trafficking because they are emotionally immature and are looking for someone to 
understand them. They are also more likely to allow people they do not know to follow them on 
social media because they want the validation and attention from a large following. Oftentimes, 
they will share online what is making them upset and traffickers will reach out to them to make 
an emotional connection that can lead to manipulation and eventually trafficking. Notably, some 
social media sites have features that include GPS (snapchat) or location sharing (Facebook & 
Instagram) that are supposed to be used to tell friends where they are (Anthony, 2018). However, 
if a child is followed by a trafficker then that predator can use this information to find and kidnap 
them.  

Despite a popular belief that victims of trafficking are cut off from the internet and the 



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outside world, more than three quarters of survivors in Polaris’s survey of victims of human 
trafficking stated they used internet platforms during their exploitation (Anthony, 2018). 
Platforms such as Snapchat or Wickr (a site that allows user to send encrypted text, audio, video 
or photo messages) can be used by victims because of their features that allow for messages to 
disappear. This can help those who are kept in captivity reach out to their families and try to 
escape, but traffickers are more likely to not allow their victims to use apps with disappearing 
message features.  

Nonetheless, in most modern cases of human trafficking, victims are still allowed to use 
their social media accounts. The trafficker may want it to look as though the victim is happy and 
safe despite their situation and will therefore let them continue to post and message their family 
and friends. In the case of minors being trafficked, the amount of internet use is even larger. 
According to Thorn, a non-profit organization that works to protect children from sexual 
exploitation, 74% of victims we allowed to have personal phones. Of those with phones, 75% 
had access to the internet during the time they were trafficked and 90% with access to the 
internet used social media (Bouché, 2018). The study found that most calls and messages to 
family and friends were highly monitored, but many victims had less restricted access to social 
media. The reason behind this more open access was because victims were often forced to use 
websites and apps to help sell themselves. 75% of participants in the study said they were 
advertised online and 52% of them wrote their ads themselves. These ads included a variety of 
keywords provided by their traffickers to signal that they were underage (Bouché, 2018). A very 
common site used to post these ads was called Backpage. Backpage was a classified advertising 
website that had become the largest marketplace for buying and selling sex. In April of 2018, 
Backpage was seized by the FBI and essentially shutdown (Jarrett, 2018). Despite a progressive 
step forward, many of the sellers moved from Backpage onto different platforms like Craigslist 
or Facebook.   

 The study connected by Thorn also looked at which apps were being most commonly 
used by trafficked minors and found that 51% had a Facebook account and 23% had an 
Instagram (Bouché, 2018).  Since these social media outlets are the top two most commonly used 
by victims, they could work with initiatives like the Blue Campaign to include features that 
would allow victims to signal to national hotlines that they need help. This kind of feature could 
pop up as an advertisement or be located on a Facebook page does not immediately signal to the 
trafficker that it is a hotline in order to protect the victim. From there, they could be directed to 
the Department of Homeland Security website or a non-profit anti-trafficking organization.  

Even though technology and social media are making it easier for people to be trafficked, 
they can also be used to pinpoint traffickers and identify potential victims. The most innovative 
example of this is the development of PhotoDNA by Microsoft. This technology, “attempts to 
identify victims by scanning photos uploaded to the platform and to match them against a set of 
known child sex abuse images from illicit child pornography websites…” (Anthony, 2018). 
Thus, if victims can be identified, then the police can use the profiles on the websites that 
uploaded the material to track down the victims and help them escape. A recent example of 



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modern technology being used to locate a victim was in New York City. A trafficking victim 
was photographed on top of 100-dollar bills and using image enhancement, the police were able 
to read the serial numbers on the money. Investigators were able to track where this money was 
used and arrest a man who had been trafficking minors for over 10 years (Sex Trafficking 
moves…, 2016). Using technology to locate human traffickers is an important way to address 
this security issue, but social media outlets can be doing more than what they currently are. 
These platforms have the capability to build algorithms that could flag adults who are following 
and communicating with minors or help produce content that is intended to teach minors about 
the dangers of trafficking or how to spot someone who may be a trafficker online. 

 Legally, media companies have no direct responsibility for the content that is produced 
on their platforms. According to Polaris, “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 
protected… all web companies from liability for anything on their sites that is created by others” 
(Anthony, 2018). This bill eventually went under some revision with the implementation of the 
Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and changed the ruling to say that companies can be sued 
civilly and prosecuted at the state level if they knowingly facilitate sex trafficking. The loophole 
here is that if sites choose not to actively prevent trafficking then they can reasonably say that 
they did not know what was happening. Moreover, victims of trafficking are unlikely to have 
much money, so their chances of winning a civil lawsuit against a large media corporation are 
quite small. Although it is difficult to say what the government should do in response to this, the 
public should encourage social networking companies to be more accountable for the material 
and activities on their site regarding sex trafficking.  
  Importantly, social media sites are not the only ones responsible for combatting human 
trafficking. Globally, policy towards human trafficking is very diverse and ranges in its 
effectiveness across various countries and cultures. Each nation has different types of trafficking 
that are more prevalent and different laws for how to combat it. In the United States, the first 
federal law against human trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was 
passed in 2000. The law, which has provisions for reauthorization and new amendments nearly 
every four years, works to prevent labor and sex trafficking while punishing offenders. Additions 
to the law in recent years have included a provision for the Department of Labor to release a list 
of products produced by forced and child labor, measures to add liability to government 
contractors using trafficked labor, and stricter punishments for those traveling for sex tourism 
(Jesionka, 2013).  

Other countries have also taken a more active approaches to the threat of trafficking by 
passing more progressive legislation. In Sweden, Denmark, France, Iceland, and Ireland it is 
illegal to buy sex but not to sell it. Sweden, which was the first nation to adopt these laws, found 
sex trafficking decreased because, according to Equality Now, “criminalization of women and 
girls in the sex trade leaves them more vulnerable, while the possession of a criminal record can 
make it even harder to exit the trade” (The Equality Approach…, 2018). Sweden saw a nearly 
50% decrease in men looking to purchase sex once these laws were enacted. Because of this, 
Sweden has become an undesirable place for sex traffickers to work and the instances of sex 



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trafficking have decreased significantly (The Equality Approach…, 2018).  
However, these countries are in the minority, and human trafficking is still neglected as a 

national security issue in most places. In the most recent global reports, only 9,071 cases of 
human trafficking were tried and convicted in 2016, with the vast majority being in Southeast 
and Central Asia (HumanrightsFirst.org, 2017). Relative to the amount of trafficking victims 
each year, nearly 25 million, these numbers demonstrate a clear failure on the part of the 
international community to address human trafficking as a priority.  

Still, many scholars are skeptical about labeling a human security threat as a national 
security problem. National security is a difficult concept to define and is what constitutes a part 
of security is largely determined by the government in power. In general, national security 
encompasses defense of citizens, economy, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of 
government. In terms of defense of citizens, human trafficking is a clear violation of the human 
rights. Yet, the problem extends even further into the economic and institutional security. 
According to Roza Pati, “human trafficking is now a business of choice for well-organized and 
versatile crime syndicates” (Pati, 2014). Due to increased border security and tougher 
immigration laws, operations looking to smuggle people and drugs had to become more effective 
and organized. Many of these criminal organizations have learned how to evade international law 
enforcement, judicial systems and tax systems, in order to launder money and people. These 
large-scale crime operations use this knowledge to procure victims for labor or sex trafficking 
and use the money to fund more illicit activity.  

Similarly, studies have shown that the profits made from human trafficking are also used 
to fund terrorism. The Salafi Network (Global Salafi Jihad) uses money from human trafficking 
as well as the notorious narcoterrorism group Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) (Pati, 2014). According 
to studies done in the United States, nearly 46% of respondents said they were worried about 
becoming a victim of terrorism and 10-20% were very worried about it (Ritchie, Hasell, Appel, 
& Roser, 2013). With a citizenry that is this concerned about terrorism, the government must 
work to prevent human trafficking which helps to fund it. If governments are unable to stop 
major crime networks working within their own boarders, then they are not adequately protecting 
their citizens. Therefore, because human trafficking is so intertwined with organized crime it 
threatens economies and institutions, and because it is a violation of human rights, it should be 
considered a major national security concern.  

In general, there are three main paths that can be taken to stop trafficking by 
policymakers. The first is to decriminalize prostitution so more women can leave trafficking 
without being punished. Many trafficking victims are currently unwilling to cooperate out of fear 
of law enforcement and deportation, which makes identification and rehabilitation efforts 
difficult (Schoeberl & Nivens, 2018). This also leads to a gap in knowledge for scholars who 
have a hard time finding victims to study because of the fear of prosecution. As a result, few 
large-scale human trafficking prevalence studies have been able to be conducted, so the problem 
may be way worse than predicted. Like in Sweden, making punishments harsher for people 
looking to buy sex will raise the stakes for the purchaser, which can help decrease the market 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government


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within that country. The second path is to make social media sites more accountable and work 
closer with anti-trafficking initiatives. Requiring media companies to monitor adults who follow 
kids or who pretend to be children while implementing ways for victims to reach out through 
social media will help prevent human trafficking online. Finally, the third path is to increase 
awareness by having trafficking issues be taught in schools, especially low performing ones 
where kids are more likely to be victims. Educating people on the dangers of trafficking through 
initiatives like the Blue Campaign, will help minors understand the dangers and avoid becoming 
victims.   

Overall, technology is a huge part of how human traffickers find their victims and 
customers in the 21st century. As a new generation of minors grow up in the age of social media 
it is important that policy makers and the general public push to educate young people on the 
dangers of trafficking. With that being said, there is not one simple answer to how human 
trafficking can be stopped and no matter what laws are passed individuals need to educate 
themselves of the warning signs of trafficking. People can work to help prevent trafficking by 
being informed about the types of trafficking and knowing the warning signs, while national 
governments can work harder to make trafficking more difficult and less appealing within their 
borders. If policy makers choose to make human trafficking a priority to national security, they 
will be able to better protect their citizens from the threat of modern-day slavery.  
 
  



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	Human Trafficking as a National Security Issue



