Slavery isn’t just a sin of the past. Today, the United Nations’ International Labour Organization estimates that more than 40 million victims of human trafficking are forced to engage in commercial sex or labor under the threat of physical and/or financial harm. The number in the U.S. reaches into the hundreds of thousands.

Victor Boutros, founding director and CEO of the Virginia-based Human Trafficking Institute, examines the growing issue and efforts to combat it. As a former member of the U.S. Justice Department’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, he has spent time with traffickers as well as victims and learned this much: It's an economically motivated crime, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. Risk to the trafficker is a deterrent.

Boutros is a graduate of Baylor University, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago and co-author of The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence.