Human trafficking victims mostly underage children from within the US

Every year more than 40 million people are forced into the world of human trafficking, someone's sons and daughters trapped in this modern-day slavery.

It’s everyday Americans who are the most common victims of human trafficking, with some as young as 10 years old being traded or sold for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

Trafficking is a persistent problem in the United States and across the globe. While awareness has been raised in recent years, most are unaware of how widespread the problem is. Occurring everywhere from major cities to idyllic rural communities, trafficking traps people in a dark, insidious criminal world.

The Investigative Unit at Fox News has spent the past several months examining this growing issue, and the findings are shocking. Those who are sold into this forced life are often people from within the U.S.

The "average person seems to think it's a foreign national who’s come from really far away. That they’re smuggled in illegally. But the truth of the matter is in the years that I've worked with survivors of trafficking, over 90 percent are U.S. citizens,” Andrea Powell, founding president ofthe advocacy group Karana Rising, told Fox News during a recent interview in Washington, D.C.

“She [the victim] is lured by someone pretending to be a father figure or more accurately usually a boyfriend or sort of a combination of both,” Powell adds. “I've worked with over a thousand survivors of trafficking and I can think of two or three fathers who were involved in the lives of their daughters before they were trafficked.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/human-trafficking-victims-are-mostly-underage-children-from-within-the-us

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