Human trafficking is the deliberate exploitation of a person for profit. It happens in every country we work in, and the vast majority of the victims are girls. The work begins by refusing to look away.
Trafficking statistics are imperfect because trafficking is hidden, but the numbers below are the most credible global estimates available, sourced from the International Labour Organization and the United Nations.
People living in conditions of forced labour worldwide, the largest category of modern slavery.
Source · ILO 2022One in four people trafficked or held in forced labour is a child. Most of those children are girls.
Source · ILO, IOM, UNEstimated yearly revenue generated by traffickers worldwide, more than the GDP of most countries.
Source · ILO estimateDaughter Project field offices on four continents, each led by indigenous staff and partnered with local law enforcement.
Daughter Project · 2026The legal definition under the United Nations Palermo Protocol has three parts. An act, such as recruitment or transport. A means, such as force, fraud, or coercion. And a purpose, which is exploitation, most often for sex or for labour. When the victim is a child, the means does not have to be proven. Recruitment and intent are enough.
That definition matters because the popular picture of trafficking is mostly wrong. Most girls are not chained in basements. Most are not snatched by strangers in white vans. The far more common pattern is a person she already knows, a promise of work or marriage, and a slow tightening of debt, isolation, and threat.
Once a girl is in, the exploitation is sustained by economic dependence, document confiscation, threats against her family, and the simple fact that there is rarely a safe place to run to. Daughter Project exists to build that safe place, and to walk her out.
Cross-border trafficking from rural counties to San Salvador and the Gulf states for domestic labour.
Internal trafficking of girls from northern districts into urban labour and exploitation.
Major source country. Girls trafficked into Europe and the Gulf under false labour or marriage promises.
Vast internal trafficking from rural states into red-light districts and bonded labour in cities.
Cross-border trafficking into India and the Gulf, often disguised as employment or marriage.
Sex tourism and forced online scam compounds. Heavy targeting of girls from rural Khmer provinces.
One of the largest sources of online child sexual exploitation material in the world.
SCIO Scotland charity. County-lines exploitation, modern slavery, and care-leaver vulnerability across England and Scotland.
Tourist-district exploitation and cross-border trafficking from Myanmar. Long-stay shelter and vocational restoration.
Domestic trafficking through foster care exits, runaway pathways, and online recruitment.
If you have ever watched a viral rescue video and wondered what happened to the girl after, this section is for you. These are the patterns the Daughter Project deliberately refuses.
Graphic statistics and lurid stories raise donations but raise no daughters. They centre the predator, not the survivor, and rarely shift the conditions that put her at risk in the first place.
Kicking down a door and filming the raid is not the work. Without long-term shelter, counselling, legal advocacy, and family restoration, most rescued girls are re-trafficked within twelve months.
Foreign teams that fly in for a campaign, drop resources, and fly out. The most expensive way to do the least lasting good. Local economies and local trust both suffer when the team disappears.
Every Daughter Project program is built on three commitments. They are unglamorous, expensive, and the only model with field evidence behind it.
Community clubs, school curricula, family economic strengthening, and local-language awareness work that reach a girl years before a trafficker does. Cheaper, kinder, far more effective.
Trauma-informed counselling, schooling, vocational training, legal advocacy, and family reunification, sustained for years. The goal is not rescue. The goal is a daughter fully home and not coming back.
Every shelter and every prevention club is staffed by people who grew up in the country, speak the language, and know the village. Foreign staff serve them. They do not lead them.
Prevention, intervention, restoration. Run together, sequenced to the daughter's pace, delivered by local staff in ten countries. Every dollar, every club, every shelter bed plugs into this model.
15 shelters across 10 countries provide prevention before trafficking begins.
1,795 daughters cared for in residential shelter.
2,000+ children reunited with family.
The opposite of trafficking is not rescue. The opposite of trafficking is a family that does not let her go.— Linnea Halsten, Founder, Daughter Project
Every gift funds prevention before exploitation, shelter after rescue, and the long road home. Every gift signs the same promise. We stay until she is home.
Real lives behind the numbers
