It’s low-cost, low-maintenance and low-risk, with annual profits in the billions.
It’s child trafficking. And the demand—never higher—is only growing.
“For sexual violence against children and attacks on schools and hospitals we are going to see an increase.”
Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Violence against Children Najat Maalla M’jid dropped that bombshell in her briefing to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this month.
It’s difficult to think of anything more defenseless than a child. A butterfly, perhaps. But butterflies can’t be exploited the way children can—for sex, domestic slavery, child marriage, recruitment into armed groups, forced begging and other criminal activities.
That defenselessness shows up in the statistics: Nearly 40 percent of the entire slave trade involves buying and selling the world’s children.
“Conviction for trafficking in children remains low, and perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity,” Ms. M’jid said. “Corruption, stigma, fear and the lack of protection limits children’s ability to report and seek justice.”
Add high-tech and high demand to that low risk, and the result is a planet-wide catastrophe in the making. The Special Representative warned that traffickers have increased their efficiency and growth through artificial intelligence, a gambit that lowers both their overheads and their chances of getting caught.
AI-powered social media algorithms enable traffickers to target vulnerable individuals—including underaged teens—with phony ads like fake job offers and romantic schemes, all while remaining anonymous. Meanwhile, on the demand side, new “deepfake technology” creates images and videos out of whole cloth to lure those in the market for depravity, again with the traffickers’ identities masked to protect the guilty.
Organized, overt and confident in the lack of legal guardrails, dealers in human flesh have taken advantage of a world in which children are increasingly at risk. Those risk factors, Ms. M’jid pointed out, are precise and very specific: poverty, famine, humanitarian crises and conflict.
Just how at risk children are was spelled out in grim detail to the Human Rights Council by Virginia Gamba, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict: “In 2024, more than one in six children globally lived in conflict situations, forced to suffer abhorrent abuses and violations of their rights…. I can say that, in many countries, the situation for children has worsened yet again. For sexual violence against children and attacks on schools and hospitals we are going to see an increase.”
Ms. Gamba voiced her deep concern for the plight of the world’s young people and asserted that: “As a global community, we have a shared responsibility and interest to forge a world in which every child is nurtured by love, shielded from harm and allowed to grow in peace.”
Is that too much to ask for a child?
A butterfly’s chance?
