The U.S. Department of State has published the 2010 report on human trafficking.
According to the report, 12.3 million men, women and children around the world are forced into work or prostitution, with the traffickers earning up to 32 thousand million dollars per year. In some cases the victims are literally kidnapped or reduced to slavery. In the majority of cases they are forced to sell themselves to escape ethnic persecution, war and subhuman living conditions.
All of this means that that initial figure could be increased ten-fold to give a more realistic idea of the numbers of people that are The Wretched of the Earth.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:22MB).