The most documented forms of human trafficking are sex trafficking, forced labor, and domestic servitude, but trafficking takes many forms, including organ trafficking, forced criminality, and forced recruitment into armed groups.
Human trafficking is one of the most prevalent and legally documented forms of modern-day slavery. It is defined in international law as the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of people through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of exploitation. Understanding its forms matters, because each operates differently, targets different vulnerabilities, and requires different responses.
Sex trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of people through force, fraud, coercion, or abuse of power for the purpose of commercial sexual services. It is not always physically violent. Traffickers use debt, psychological manipulation, false promises of work or relationships, and the confiscation of identification or freedom of movement to maintain control. Victims are often moved across borders or between cities to disorient them and sever support networks.
Under international law, all commercial sexual activity involving anyone under 18 is automatically considered trafficking, regardless of apparent consent, regardless of whether force was used, and regardless of whether money changed hands directly with the minor.
Forced labor is any work compelled through threat of punishment, violence, or coercion. It is the single most common form of human trafficking globally and occurs across agriculture, fishing, construction, manufacturing, domestic work, and increasingly in illegal industries including mining and deforestation. Not For Sale has documented firsthand that victims of forced labor are frequently the ones carrying out environmental destruction, clearing forests, panning rivers for illegal gold, coerced into ecocide by the same systems that profit from their bondage.
Forced labor is not always easy to identify. Victims may appear to be working voluntarily, may be paid some wages, and may not self-identify as trafficked. The defining factor is not the absence of payment, it is the absence of freedom.
Domestic servitude is a form of forced labor in which individuals, most often women and migrants, are made to work in private homes under coercive or abusive conditions. Victims are typically isolated from outside contact, their movements restricted, their identification confiscated, and their ability to leave removed through debt, threats, or psychological control.
Its setting inside the home makes it among the most hidden forms of human trafficking. There are no factory floors, no fishing vessels, no visible worksites, only a private residence that the outside world rarely enters. This invisibility is deliberate, and it is part of what makes domestic servitude so difficult to detect and prosecute.
An increasingly documented form of trafficking in which victims are coerced into committing crimes, drug trafficking, petty theft, online fraud, or operating illegal scam centers, on behalf of their traffickers. Victims in these situations are frequently arrested and prosecuted for crimes they were forced to commit, compounding their harm. Large-scale forced criminality operations have been documented across Southeast Asia, where tens of thousands of people have been trafficked into online scam compounds.
The illegal removal, sale, or transplantation of human organs, most often targeting people in desperate financial circumstances who are deceived or coerced into giving up organs, frequently for a fraction of the payment promised, or none at all. It operates at the intersection of global inequality and medical demand, exploiting the gap between those who can pay for organs and those who cannot afford to refuse.
The conscription, recruitment, or use of children under 18 by armed forces or groups for combat, support roles, or sexual purposes constitutes a severe and internationally recognized form of human trafficking. It typically occurs through abduction or coercion in conflict zones where state authority has collapsed. Not For Sale has worked directly with communities affected by forced recruitment in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Human trafficking does not exist in isolation from the broader system of modern-day slavery. The debt bondage that traps a domestic worker in a private home in the Netherlands is connected to the forced labor that drives illegal mining in the Congo Basin. The sexual exploitation of a child in Thailand is enabled by the same conditions of poverty and impunity that produce forced labor in Peru's Amazon. Not For Sale works across all of these intersections, because that is where the system can be broken.
Designs programs that address the specific conditions driving trafficking in each community, before, during, and after crisis.
Provides survivors with safe housing, counseling, medical care, legal support, education, and job readiness, the full spectrum of recovery.
Builds lasting partnerships with local organizations, Indigenous communities, and social enterprises to deliver care that outlasts any single program.
Creates economic alternatives in vulnerable communities, so that trafficking loses its grip before it starts.
Confronts ecocide and forced labor as one connected crisis, protecting the ecosystems and communities that depend on each other.
Launches and scales mission-driven businesses, including REBBL, Dignita, and Regenerate Technology Global, that generate lasting economic dignity for survivors and at-risk communities.
Human trafficking takes many forms, sexual, labor-based, domestic, and beyond. Not For Sale works across all of them, with programs built around the agency and long-term recovery of survivors, and the systemic changes that prevent trafficking from taking hold in the first place.