About 2.4 million of them, according to figures issued by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), have been trafficked. Of these, half are children. There are Chinese people trafficked to sweatshops in France, Filipinos to domestic service across the Middle East, Zambian girls to brothels in Ireland. Trafficked children, as young as five, are currently at work on plantations and in sweatshops across Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Togo. Few of them will ever see their parents again, and they will spend their short lives paying off supposed debts to their traffickers and employers in bonded labour. But whether it is actually useful or appropriate to regard trafficked workers solely as helpless pawns in a game not of their making, without concentrating first on world poverty, labour markets and organised crime, is a question increasingly being asked. 

Trafficked people are economic migrants-but with a difference. For, unlike migrants, they have been deceived, lured by false promises and later locked into indebtedness or terrorised into submission. Trafficking differs fundamentally from smuggling, with which it is often confused, for while smuggling involves the consent of the individual to be taken illegally across a border and terminates at the point of destination, trafficking involves deception and ongoing exploitation. Even if a person has at some point consented — as Natasha did — consent becomes meaningless where deception and coercion follow. All trafficked people, at some point, are duped and misinformed. Most are isolated and lacking in knowledge of local laws, and all engage in work that is unsupervised, underpaid and without contract. Afraid of their traffickers and of being arrested and deported, they neither appeal for help nor go to the police for they, as many know only too well from their own countries, can also be brutal and corrupt. Most have no passport, all documents having been taken from them by their "employers".

"What makes it so terrible," says Michael Korsinski, of the Helen Bamber Foundation in London, "is that what is being exploited is hope, the hope and longing of people for something better. The combination of abuse, deceit and brutality amounts to a kind of modern torture. It is on our doorstep and it permeates society. It breaks people — which is what it is designed to do."

Trafficking is not new. In the 16th century the term was synonymous with trading. By the 17th, it had acquired dubious overtones, denoting the sale of contraband, and by the 19th it had come to include human beings, traded as merchandise into slavery. The destination countries are frequently the most developed ones, those which are rightly proud of their human rights records, like the UK and France, but where the greed for cheap goods leads to labour exploitation and where the trade in people finds secret invisible places, disused warehouses or derelict caravans, not readily discovered by police and inspectors. While globalisation is driving deregulation and the opening of borders to the trade in goods, concerns about illegal immigration and terrorism are at the same time leading states to tighten their borders. It is where legal avenues for migration are blocked, where there is constant pressure on employers to cut costs, where there are long subcontracting chains and where birth rates are falling. People are living beyond their reproductive years so labour is needed to sustain economic growth, thus vulnerable people, driven by desperation and poverty, become prey to traffickers, the brokers and facilitators for hard, dirty, dangerous work.

And the profits — to organised crime, to the traffickers, to the many people who fill positions in the long and deceitful line between recruitment and forced labour — are immense. The ILO's most recent Global Report estimated at $31.7 billion — well over double Mali's entire annual GDP — the illicit profits produced in one year by trafficked workers. The "opportunity cost" of coercion to the workers themselves — excluding the women and children in sexual exploitation — may be as high as $20 billion, taking into account unpaid wages, unremunerated overtime and other deductions. While the extent to which patterns of exploitation and trafficking have been influenced by the global financial crisis remains unclear, trafficking in 2009 is very big business indeed.