This report builds upon Polaris’s 2017 report, The Typology of Modern Slavery, which analyzed data, gleaned from nearly 10 years of operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, to show that human trafficking in the United States consists of 25 distinct business models. For each, the Typology report illuminated the basic operational plan – the demographics of both victims and traffickers, and how victims are recruited and controlled. This report focuses on the private and public-private sector because fighting human trafficking will require participation by business and industry partners with resources at a comparable scale. The sectors explored in this report – the financial services industry, social media, transportation industry, hotels & motels, housing & homelessness systems, and health care – are not the only private businesses that intersect with human trafficking. Nor are they “to blame” in some way for human trafficking. Indeed, as
you will read, many stakeholders in each of these systems and industries are already doing innovative work or making powerful commitments to becoming part of the solution.
