Davina P. Durgana and Paul L. Zador

It is much easier to protect what one can count and identify. Modern slavery prevention and intervention efforts can become more effective and targeted with better information about how many victims exist and where they are likely to be found.

Measuring prevalence in modern slavery has historically presented several challenges. Definitional disagreements, lack of national coordination between all anti-slavery stakeholders and their data collection systems, and limited funding have played roles in the difficulties of obtaining a widely accepted and methodologically rigorous national prevalence estimate for human trafficking in the United States. Some global estimation efforts have included disaggregated national estimates for the U.S. alongside many other countries, but a more-focused and customized effort is required to estimate modern slavery in a country as populous, diverse, and critically nuanced as the U.S.

There are some concerns about the divisive repercussions of multiple, wide-ranging previous estimates in the U.S. and some of their particular foci on specific target populations, such as minors or foreign nationals, and industries such as commercial sexual exploitation of minors or agricultural labor.

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