MinistryWatch Guide to Giving to Anti-Trafficking Organizations

What is trafficking, how are cases tracked, and how can donors help?

Jessica’s story is harrowing — a chilling account of coercion and control.

Just 20 years old and living in suburban Minneapolis, Jessica (not her real name) was trapped in a prostitution ring where her traffickers controlled her every move.

They texted addresses where she was expected to meet clients. Unbeknownst to her, they had inserted a tracking device under her skin — likely while she was drugged or intoxicated — so they could always monitor her. They would show up wherever she went: her job, the library, even her grandmother’s house. It was psychological warfare.

“You can’t imagine how they gaslit her,” said Laura Mulliken, executive director of Minnesota-based Trafficking Justice. “One time they broke into her house and locked her cat — which she adores — in a room, making her fearful for herself and her cat.”

The traffickers wanted to remind Jessica that she wasn’t safe. Jessica became paranoid, withdrawn, and physically unwell. Her family feared she was mentally ill.

“She was driven crazy by these people,” Mulliken said.

Then a relative heard Mulliken speak at a St. Paul-area church. Mulliken described signs of trafficking that sounded all too familiar. That connection led to police involvement and the discovery of the tracking device.

With the help of Mulliken and Trafficking Justice, Jessica is now out of her traffickers’ immediate control, but her recovery is far from over. Like many victims, she may need to move far away from her traffickers to begin healing truly.

Jessica’s story is heartbreaking — and it is why Christian organizations across the country are rising to confront the dark reality of human trafficking in all its forms: labor, sex, and even organ trafficking.

But how common is her story?

Anti-trafficking organizations emphasize that trafficking and slavery are widespread, often citing a figure of 50 million victims worldwide — a number drawn from a report by the International Labour Organization.

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But the U.S. State Department says there are 27 million trafficking victims worldwide — and a decade earlier the State Department was using a number that was less than 1 million.

Why the wide variance? One reason is the ongoing challenge of defining “trafficking.” Another is that only a fraction of traffickers are ever caught, leaving many victims hidden and making accurate estimates difficult.

Also, it’s not unexpected that organizations seeking donations might highlight the most alarming numbers to underscore the urgency of their work.

Even one girl trafficked for sex, one boy forced to work in a factory, or one adult compelled to make scam phone calls is one too many. There are almost certainly hundreds of thousands — likely millions — of victims. But 50 million? That’s difficult to verify.

Ministry Watch, an independent Christian organization that evaluates Protestant ministries for financial accountability and transparency, seeks to help donors give wisely. This guide is intended to help you better understand the trafficking crisis and the organizations working to combat it.

How Many Victims?

Determining the full scope of human trafficking is challenging, in part because it includes far more than the sex trafficking most people associate with the term.

The U.S. Department of State reported in June that an estimated 27 million people worldwide are exploited for “labor, services and commercial sex.”

“Through force, fraud and coercion, they are made to toil in fields and factories, in restaurants and residences. Traffickers prey on some of the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable individuals — profiting from their plight,” the State Department said in its 2024 “Trafficking in Persons Report.”

The State Department has been using that 27 million number since 2012. Before that, it used an estimate of 600,000 to 800,000 for years, Ronald Weitzer, a professor emeritus of sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., wrote in his 2020 paper “Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.”

Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization (ILO) — an organization widely quoted by anti-trafficking organizations — reported in September 2022 that nearly 50 million people around the globe were trapped in modern slavery. The ILO includes both forced labor and forced marriage in its estimate.

Definition Problems

So why do estimates of trafficking victims vary so widely — from fewer than 1 million 25 years ago to somewhere between 27 million and 50 million today? And what evidence supports the 50 million figure often cited by anti-trafficking groups, many of which rely solely on the ILO’s report?

One reason is that the organizations say they have changed their methodologies over the years. Another reason is the challenge of defining trafficking.

Both the State Department and the ILO, which is a specialized agency of the United Nations, use different definitions in their methodology. How do organizations and governments distinguish between human “smuggling,” where a person wants to move illegally and gets help from a smuggler, and “trafficking,” where someone is coerced into moving from their home?

Is it trafficking if an adult willingly engages in commercial sex? Is it right to include “forced marriages” in the numbers?

“It is questionable whether the notion of a culturally ordained but not fully consensual marriage is tantamount to slavery,” Weitzer said.

The Various Kinds of Trafficking

Human trafficking takes many forms, each involving the exploitation of vulnerable people through coercion, deception or force. While sex trafficking often draws the most public attention, it represents only one part of a much broader global crisis.

• Sex Trafficking — Victims are forced, deceived or coerced into commercial sex acts. Women and children are the most common targets.
• Labor Trafficking — Individuals are exploited for work under threat, debt bondage or abusive conditions, often in agriculture, construction or domestic work.
• Forced Child Labor — Children are made to work in hazardous or exploitative environments, depriving them of education and safety.
• Child Soldiering — Children are forcibly recruited or used by armed groups for combat or support roles.
• Forced Marriage — Individuals, often girls, are coerced into marriage against their will and may face lifelong abuse.
• Organ Trafficking — Victims are exploited for their organs, often through coercion, deception or outright theft.
• Sextortion — Children are coerced into sharing explicit images. Offenders often use social media, gaming platforms or messaging apps to groom and exploit their victims — sometimes without ever meeting them in person.
• Forced Scamming — Victims are coerced into committing online fraud — such as romance scams or cryptocurrency schemes — often under threat or in abusive conditions, especially in scam centers across parts of Asia. The victims often are trapped to work after traveling to take falsely advertised overseas jobs.

More on Sex Trafficking

While labor trafficking and forced marriage allegedly have the most victims, sex trafficking usually gets the most media attention because the victims are usually women and children, evoking a strong emotional response from the public.

The ILO estimates that about 6.3 million people are being trafficked for sex — and women and girls make up 80% of that category.

Of the total number of trafficked people, 38% are children, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons.

And, of course, human trafficking is big business, generating about $236 billion in illegal profits annually, according to the ILO.

That’s a 37% increase since 2014, driven by a rise in the number of individuals subjected to forced labor and higher profits per victim.

Sexual exploitation, which accounts for 27% of forced labor victims, contributes 73% of these illegal profits, according to the ILO.

Traffickers earn an average of more than $27,000 per victim in forced commercial sexual exploitation, compared to about $3,700 per victim in other forms of forced labor.

Newer Forms of Trafficking

While sex and labor remain the primary drivers of trafficking, technology is rapidly changing how traffickers operate — making exploitation easier to carry out and harder to detect.

Sextortion

Sextortion has become the fastest-growing cybercrime against children in North America, especially targeting teen boys, according to USA Today.

Since 2021, at least 30 teen boys have died by suicide as a result, and the FBI identified more than 12,600 victims who were minors from October 2021 to March 2023.

Scammers often pose as peers or romantic interests on platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, coaxing boys into sharing explicit images, then extorting them with threats to expose the content unless money is paid.

One case involved James Woods, a 17-year-old from Ohio who died by suicide after receiving more than 200 threatening messages in 20 hours. He paid $100 of a $300 demand, but the threats didn’t stop.

In Minnesota, Laura Mulliken of Trafficking Justice worked with a 13-year-old victim lured into a chat room through the video game Minecraft.

“They will help the victim get to the next level of the video game, befriend them, and then they’ll convince them to take the chat offline or to other apps like Discord or Snapchat,” Mulliken said.

In this case, the predator coerced the boy into sending photos, then threatened to share them with his church or grandmother. His parents intervened after noticing changes in behavior, and with help from a therapist, the boy revealed the full story.

“It’s embarrassing and terrifying for a 13-year-old,” Mulliken said. “The number of sextortion cases is much, much higher than before.”

Scam Centers

A recent crackdown by Thai, Chinese, and Myanmar authorities liberated more than 7,000 individuals from scam compounds in southeastern Myanmar, where they had been forced into cyber scams targeting victims worldwide.

These freed workers, originating from various countries, then found themselves detained near the Myanmar border, awaiting repatriation.

An estimated 300,000 individuals are still trapped in similar operations across the region, according to The Associated Press.

Individuals are lured to scam centers through deceptive job offers promising lucrative positions in countries like Thailand.

Upon arrival, their passports are confiscated, and they are confined to compounds where they are coerced into conducting online scams targeting victims worldwide. Refusal to comply often results in physical abuse or starvation.

Trafficking in the United States

How serious is the trafficking problem in the United States? It’s difficult to say with certainty. Most available statistics — especially those cited by anti-trafficking organizations — highlight the global scope of the issue and often don’t provide specific data for the U.S.

While many of these organizations are headquartered in the United States, their primary focus tends to be overseas, where trafficking is considered more widespread and severe.

The Human Trafficking Hotline, a tip service based in Washington, D.C., that aims to assist trafficking victims, says it identified about 9,600 trafficking cases in the U.S. in 2023 and 17,000 victims.

About 58% of the cases were for sex and 16% for labor. The plurality of labor trafficking cases was for domestic work followed by food service. About 71% of the total were women and 26% were children.

But Amy Farrell, a Northeastern University professor who studies human trafficking, says in a new report that trafficking is vastly underreported in the U.S.

She says that state and regional law enforcement records likely reflect less than 10% of trafficking victims, partially because police don’t have the specialized training necessary to identify human trafficking when they see it. Also, police often don’t have an option to classify a crime as trafficking.

“If a state crime reporting system literally doesn’t have a box to check that classifies something as human trafficking, all those crimes have to be classified as something else,” Farrell said in a report in Northeastern Global News. “This results in major misclassification of trafficking cases, and leads to an incredibly massive undercount.”

Sometimes, Farrell said, sex trafficking cases are misclassified as prostitution.

Ministry Watch’s guide to anti-trafficking organizations

Who We Track

Ministry Watch tracks the finances of 12 anti-trafficking organizations. Most are Christian-based; all receive millions of dollars from Christians. Those ministries have a combined annual revenue of about $230 million.

Two organizations make up nearly 75% of that total.

The biggest is the International Justice Mission, which had revenue of more than $118 million last year. It’s a Christian-based, legal advocacy organization that employs 1,200 professionals in 30 countries.

The other is OUR Rescue (formerly Operation Underground Railroad), which had reported revenue of more than $50 million in 2023. OUR Rescue became well known because its founder, Tim Ballard, was the focus of the popular 2023 movie “Sound of Freedom,” which depicts Ballard’s effort in combating child trafficking.

We’ll look at both more closely later.

Meanwhile, almost all of the other anti-trafficking ministries that Ministry Watch tracks each have annual revenue of well under $10 million.

Ministries We Recommend in this Sector

Nine anti-trafficking organizations that Ministry Watch tracks have a donor confidence score of at least 70, meaning that donors can “give with confidence.”

But two stand out: Atlas Free, which received a perfect score of 100, and Rapha International, which has a score of 94.

Atlas Free

Atlas Free is the only anti-trafficking organization with a perfect score of 100 — and it is among only 79 of the 1,000 groups that Ministry Watch monitors to get that score.

Based in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle, Atlas Free also was a winner of the MinistryWatch Shining Light Award in 2024 and 2022.

Atlas Free fights sex trafficking in more than 25 countries and has served nearly 1.2 million people with aftercare, prevention, outreach, awareness and intervention programs since it started in 2012.

The Christian organization, which has been a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) since 2016 and had $7.4 million in revenue last year, has an overall financial efficiency rating of 4 stars (out of 5) and a transparency grade of A.

Atlas Free’s program expense ratio was 87% last year, above the sector mean of 80%. This ratio shows the percentage of expenses allocated to program services.

Seven percent of revenue was spent on fundraising last year, a tick below the sector median of 8%.

Rapha International

Joplin, Mo.-based Rapha, which started serving trafficking survivors in 2003, is a Christian-based organization that works in Cambodia, Haiti, Thailand and the United States.

Rapha provides prevention programs and care for survivors of slavery and sexual exploitation in 11 locations around the world.

It has a donor confidence score of 94, a transparency grade of A, an overall financial efficiency rating of 3, and has been a member of ECFA since 2016.

The percentage of money it spends on fundraising and program expenses is in line with the median for all anti-trafficking organizations Ministry Watch follows. It had revenue of $5.5 million in 2023.

Other Anti-Trafficking Ministries

The remaining nine ministries have donor confidence scores ranging from 45 to 85.

A score of less than 70 will get an organization an “exercise caution” tag from Ministry Watch. Three anti-trafficking groups received that designation, and all three are not members of the ECFA.

Just becoming a member of the ECFA could vault two of those organizations to the “Give With Confidence” designation.

There are various reasons why groups might not join the ECFA, including the cost. Also, some organizations may not be Christian-based and may not want the “evangelical” designation, or being part of a Christian organization like the ECFA could be detrimental to their work in some countries.

Agape International Missions argues that Ministry Watch’s donor confidence score is too heavily weighted by ECFA membership.

“The ECFA Membership cost is not the best use of our ministry resources,” AIM said in a statement. “We believe our resources are better utilized directly within our mission to rescue, heal and empower survivors.”

Here are the other nine ministries in alphabetical order, their donor confidence scores, and a brief description of the work they do.

Agape International Missions (AIM): 60

A “Christ-led, non-denominational” nonprofit that operates rescue, restoration and prevention programs in Cambodia and Belize. The organization says it has helped rescue more than 1,600 people from trafficking since 2014, with more than 500 traffickers being arrested.

International Justice Mission: 52

IJM is a Christian organization that partners with local authorities in 19 countries to protect people in poverty from violence, trafficking and slavery. Working in Kenya, Ghana, India, Thailand, Romania, Malaysia, the Philippines and other countries, IJM has more than 1,200 employees worldwide and had revenue of more than $118 million in 2024.

IJM has faced controversy in the past. Two years ago, a BBC Africa Eye article said it discovered two documented cases where children were “traumatically and unjustly removed” from their homes and their relatives were wrongly prosecuted as child traffickers. IJM disputed the reporting, saying it was fully transparent with police.

OUR Rescue (formerly Operation Underground Railroad): 45

OUR Rescue, which works to end sex trafficking and child exploitation, was founded by former Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard in 2013 as Operation Underground Railroad.

Last year it was renamed OUR Rescue and its headquarters was moved from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis. Also, Tammy Lee was named the organization’s new CEO in February 2024.

“I came into this role with the need to really turn this organization around,” Lee told Ministry Watch. “It had a troubled past.”

Many of those problems involved Ballard, who left the nonprofit in 2023 just as the hit movie about him, “Sound of Freedom,” opened in theaters.

In October, several women accused Ballard of sexual assault, and then Ballard filed defamation suits against the women.

Meanwhile, employees of OUR Rescue had complained for years that Ballard overhyped claims of rescued sex trafficking victims and used dramatic videos to over-glamorize the group’s work.

Refuge for Women: 78

This is a faith-based organization that provides long-term care for women who are survivors of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Selah Freedom: 78

Selah Freedom supports trafficking victims in their recovery and works to provide awareness about human trafficking to the public. It says it has served more than 7,000 victims and has trained nearly 85,000 youth and adults.

Shared Hope International: 80

Founded by former Congresswoman Linda Smith, Shared Hope works to prevent the conditions that foster sex trafficking, restore victims of sex slavery, and bring justice to vulnerable women and children. It operates in India, Jamaica, Nepal and the U.S.

The A21 Campaign: 70

A21 works in Australia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Greece, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, the U.K. and the U.S. It combats trafficking and modern-day slavery by raising awareness through educational programs and public campaigns. It also assists victims, supports rescue operations, and aids in the prosecution of traffickers.

The Exodus Road: 75

Exodus Road partners with law enforcement to fight human trafficking. It also provides education about trafficking and provides crisis care workers and social workers to assist victims with aftercare. It has helped free more than 5,600 victims and has supported more than 2,300 people with aftercare. It operates in Thailand, India, the Philippines, Brazil and the U.S.

ZOE International: 82

ZOE rescues orphans and children who are enslaved or at risk of being enslaved. It works in Thailand, Australia, Japan, Mexico and the U.S.

Recommendations for Donors

Human trafficking is a grave global issue — but navigating where and how to give can be difficult. Based on our research and analysis, here are several recommendations for donors:

1. Give with discernment, not emotion. Jessica’s story is powerful, but emotionally charged stories can sometimes obscure the bigger picture. Some organizations highlight the most extreme or unverifiable statistics to generate support. Look for ministries that are transparent about the scope of their work and their impact.
2. Prioritize transparency and accountability. Atlas Free and Rapha International stand out for their financial integrity and program effectiveness. Both are members of the ECFA and have strong donor confidence scores. Supporting ministries with high transparency and efficiency ratings ensures your donation is being used wisely.
3. Consider smaller, focused organizations. Large groups like IJM and OUR Rescue dominate the revenue landscape, but several smaller organizations also are doing faithful, on-the-ground work.
4. Be cautious with ministries flagged for concerns. A donor confidence score below 70 from Ministry Watch signals the need for further research. Controversies involving leadership, lack of ECFA membership, or over-hyped claims should be red flags.
5. Ask hard questions. Before giving, ask how an organization defines trafficking, how it measures success, and how it stewards funds. Effective ministries welcome scrutiny.
6. Know that giving is optional. You are not obligated to give just because a cause is urgent. Take your time, pray, and give where you see both need and integrity. When done wisely, your generosity can bring freedom, healing, and hope.

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