World Day against TraffickingUnmasking a crime hidden in plain sight

Every year, July 30 arrives with grim familiarity, marked as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons. It’s a day of observance, yes, but more than that, it’s a reckoning.

Human trafficking isn’t just a shadow industry anymore; it’s a mutating force, adapting with ruthless speed to digital shifts, economic desperation, and the growing silence that surrounds structural exploitation.

In a world that prides itself on progress and connectivity, more than 202,000 victims were officially identified between 2020 and 2023, according to the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024.

But everyone working in the field knows: those are just the visible ones. Behind those numbers are thousands more—names we’ll never know, stories never told. Children now make up 38% of all detected victims, and the trafficking of girls for sexual exploitation has surged by 38% since 2019. What’s perhaps more chilling is the shift in global patterns: while sexual exploitation still captures headlines, it’s forced labour that now dominates trafficking. Yet, the legal system continues to focus on one aspect while largely overlooking the other.

Trafficking today isn’t run by lone wolves—it’s a coordinated, global machine. Seventy-four percent of convicted traffickers are tied to organized criminal networks, according to UNODC. They move people like commodities, taking advantage of gaps in laws, fake job offers, informal migration routes, and even cryptocurrencies.

In places like Bangladesh, the picture is particularly complex. It’s a country of origin, a place of transit, and a destination—all at once. Women are lured into servitude through marriage proposals that turn out to be traps. Men are sent to work in Gulf countries by unscrupulous brokers. And in climate-hit regions like Cox’s Bazar, displaced populations are easy prey.

Despite being a signatory to the UN Trafficking Protocol, Bangladesh struggles with low conviction rates and developing systems of victim identification.

Efforts like the THB-SoM (Trafficking in human beings and smuggling of migrants) project and the national Mutual Legal Assistance pool are steps forward, but the roots of the problem run deep, and legal tools, on their own, can only go so far.

If you walk through the shelter homes in Dhaka or other places within the country, you’ll find girls as young as thirteen, rescued from brothels or domestic servitude. Many of them are still too afraid to speak. Others tell their stories like well-rehearsed scripts—trauma packaged for official documentation. Rupa (name changed), a sixteen-year-old survivor, was trafficked through a fake tailoring job and ended up in a sweatshop in India where she was beaten for asking to call her parents. She was rescued only when the police raided the building for unrelated reasons. Now, she’s back in Bangladesh—but her traffickers haven’t been arrested, and her extended family won’t take her in. This is the unspoken reality for many survivors: freedom doesn’t always follow rescue. The social shame, legal delays, and lack of meaningful reintegration mean that many return to the same conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place.

What’s often forgotten is the human rights foundation of this crisis. Theories of natural rights—going all the way back to thinkers like Locke—tell us that all people have inherent rights to safety, freedom, and dignity. These aren’t privileges granted by the state; they’re the bare minimum of being human. Yet when trafficking survivors are denied legal recognition, stigmatized, or simply forgotten, these rights aren’t just violated—they’re erased.

Philosopher Henry Shue has argued that subsistence and security are the foundation of all other rights. If those are stripped away, everything else collapses. And let’s not forget the quiet hierarchies within our concern: forced labour in a garment factory rarely sparks the outrage that sexual trafficking does. But is one life less violated than another? Or are we simply more comfortable seeing certain kinds of pain?

Much of that comfort or selective discomfort has roots in patriarchy. Feminist legal theorists like Catharine MacKinnon have long pointed out how trafficking thrives on the objectification and commodification of women. More than 61% of all detected victims are women and girls, and yet many of them, especially in conservative or rural areas, are blamed instead of believed. Their suffering becomes a mark of shame, their voices silenced in the name of family honour or community reputation. This is where anti-trafficking efforts often falter: they save bodies, but not dignity. A rescue without reintegration, without long-term psychological support or economic independence, is just another form of abandonment. Real justice demands more—demands we ask not just how people were trafficked, but why no one stopped it.

This moral failure is even more pronounced when viewed through a postcolonial lens. Modern-day trafficking doesn’t occur in a vacuum—it reflects a global economic architecture that rewards cheap labour, normalizes inequality, and externalizes risk. Countries like Bangladesh are deeply shaped by colonial histories and their aftermath—histories that extracted value from land, labour, and bodies.

Today, global supply chains do much the same. The West’s demand for fast fashion, seafood, electronics, and cheap domestic help is rarely interrogated for the human cost behind it. And those who produce these goods—often migrants, women, and children from the Global South—are rendered invisible in the process.

Trafficking isn’t the only injustice in this system, but it’s perhaps the one that most directly exposes the disposable nature of human life under modern capitalism.

Meanwhile, critical human rights theory urges us to move beyond the idea that passing laws equals delivering justice. In many countries, including Bangladesh, being a signatory to the UN Protocol is often more about international image than domestic enforcement. Legal systems remain fragmented, underfunded, and inaccessible to the poor. Worse, some victims are re-criminalized—charged with illegal migration, prostitution, or identity fraud. Instead of being seen as survivors of coercion, they are treated as perpetrators of crime. What does it say about a justice system when a trafficked girl is locked up for not having the right papers? Or when a domestic worker is deported without ever facing her employer in court? This is where our institutions, for all their paperwork and proclamations, fail us.

In contrast, the framework of transformative justice offers a path toward healing, not just punishment. Transformative justice begins with the idea that harm happens in a context, and justice should address both the harm and the conditions that allowed it. For survivors, this means more than safe houses and legal aid. It means being treated as whole people—with dreams, needs, and agency. It means ensuring access to education, mental health care, livelihood training, and community acceptance. It means allowing survivors to shape the very policies that once failed them. And it also means pushing back against corporate and digital actors who profit, knowingly or not, from trafficking. Tech companies must be held accountable for the misuse of their platforms for recruitment and grooming. Finance systems that facilitate money laundering must be part of the conversation. The fight against trafficking has to be as networked and adaptive as the crime itself.

So what does prevention look like on the ground? It starts by listening to survivors, to frontline workers, to communities that have borne the brunt of this crime for generations. Prevention looks like local governments investing in rural livelihoods so that migration isn’t the only escape from poverty. It looks like making birth registration universal so that no child “falls off the map.” It looks like school curricula that teach not only trafficking awareness but also consent, self-worth, and digital safety. And above all, it looks like believing people when they say something is wrong, whether they’re begging for help in a police station, or messaging in desperation through a borrowed phone.

We often say that trafficking is “hidden in plain sight.” But sometimes, we’ve trained ourselves not to see. Not to notice the child in the restaurant kitchen. Not to ask why a young woman can’t leave her employer’s home. Not to wonder why someone at the border is unusually quiet. Part of dismantling trafficking means unlearning that selective blindness. It means holding space for discomfort, asking difficult questions, and recognizing that some of the systems we rely on are complicit in harm.

On this World Day against Trafficking in Persons, we’re reminded of the power of visibility—but also of the risks of symbolism without substance. Campaigns like the Blue Heart must be more than moral gestures. They must force us to rethink what solidarity really looks like in a world where exploitation is so often hidden behind the veil of legality or normalized through silence. If traffickers can organize across borders, platforms, and currencies, then our response must be equally interconnected, grounded not only in law but in empathy, accountability, and action. Because trafficking, at its core, is not just a criminal act—it’s a rupture in our shared sense of who matters. Justice, then, is not merely a courtroom verdict. It is the full arc of recognition, repair, and reinvention. It’s a society choosing to care even when it’s inconvenient, to protect even when it’s politically costly, and to believe in the dignity of every life, even the ones too often hidden in shadows. We owe that not only to survivors but to ourselves, because in the end, the fight against trafficking is also the fight to remember our own humanity.

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(The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT-International University of Business Agriculture and Technology, Dhaka. She is currently on a study leave pursuing a Master’s in Human Rights and Multiculturalism at USN-University of South Eastern Norway, Drammen, Norway.)