Several fundamental issues have been obfuscated or overlooked by public awareness campaigns focused on human trafficking. Instead of identifying root causes, such as poverty, campaigns too often direct resources away from effective programmes toward marketing, thereby enriching the coffers of organisational staff and the often for-profit public relations contractors tapped to create campaigns. While the base intention of any public awareness campaign should be to foster wider and more accurate knowledge of a given subject, human trafficking awareness efforts have done little to clarify the issues at stake. Even the term itself remains vague and ill-defined, often appearing as a synonym for slavery, prostitution, debt bondage, or even legal sex work.
The popularity of awareness raising stands in stark contrast to the paucity of organisations that research or gather data on human trafficking.
The claims and finances of the majority of the top anti-trafficking organisations in the United States – such as Polaris Project, Demand Abolition, Not For Sale, Truckers Against Trafficking, and the International Justice Mission – share common and concerning features. Most, for example, exclusively claim to serve female victims of forced sexual exploitation. This narrow focus comes despite the fact that such cases comprise only a fifth of the overall global population of victims of forced labour, as calculated by the International Labour Organisation. Sexual exploitation may offer a possibility to create alluring graphics, but does not play a role in the majority of cases of human trafficking.
