Sex trafficking is one of the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprises. The corporate media is fixated on the Epstein Files right now, but the problem is far bigger than Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. The 250 teenage girls whom Epstein lured into the illicit massage industry represent only a miniscule fraction of the men, women and children sold for sex around the world every year.

Human trafficking is a crowded global highway.

27,600,600 human beings are trafficking victims:

• 77 percent (21.3 million) are victims of forced labor.
• 23 percent (6.3 million) are victims of sex trafficking.

There are three main roads of trafficking in the U.S.

CARTELS
Most children who are trafficked in the United States are bought and sold by drug cartels, which use their illegal status to discourage them from getting law enforcement involved.

FAMILY
The United Nations International Organization for Migration estimates that 15 percent of children sold for sex are trafficked by a member of their own family or foster family.

EMPLOYERS
Kidnappings are rare in the U.S. sex trade. Most victims not trafficked by a cartel or by family are approached with a deceptive job offer.

Trafficked migrants travel a well-worn track.

The Biden administration allowed over 450,000 unaccompanied children to be brought illegally over the U.S.-Mexico border, and lost track of more than 300,000 of them. Many of these children are now in the sex industry. Statistics from a Department of Health and Human Services agency called the Office on Trafficking in Persons indicate that forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled during Biden’s presidency. On the whole, cartels traffic 10 times more sex slaves in a year than Epstein did in his three-decade career.

Sex trafficking has many avenues.

Victims of human sex trafficking in the U.S. are forced into a plethora of perversions.

Illicit massage is only a street away.

There are an estimated 7,500 to 9,000 illicit massage businesses (IMBs) currently in operation in the United States. IMBs are a venue that use the cover of a legitimate bodywork or massage business to provide commercial sex acts to a customer base of sex buyers.

The child pornography lane is congested.

U.S. law enforcement officials boasted in the late 1970s that the traffic in child pornography had virtually been eliminated. The advent of the Internet in the 1980s made vast quantities of child pornography instantly available in the privacy of viewers’ homes. Some estimate that up to 20 percent of pornography on the Internet involves depictions of minors, 90 percent of whom appear to be under the age of 12.

Total number of URLs confirmed as containing child sexual abuse imagery worldwide, by year. Each URL could contain one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of individual child sexual abuse images or videos.

See complete infographic.