An announcement released on April 17, 2017, by the Covenant House – the largest privately funded charity in the Americas serving our homeless, abandoned and abused youth – revealed that recent studies found nearly 20% of homeless youth in the United States and Canada are victims of human trafficking.

Conducted by the Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research at the University of Pennsylvania and Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project in New Orleans, this research surveyed 911 homeless young people from the ages of 17 to 25 across 13 cities in the United States and Canada, between February 2014 and March 2017. The following statistics are their unfortunate findings:

19.4% of interviewed youth were trafficking victims, 15% of which were trafficked for sex, 7.4% for labor, and 3% for both.

91% of respondents in the Loyola research reported being approached by someone who was offering an opportunity for income that was too good to be true.

81% of the labor trafficking cases reported in the Loyola study involved forced drug dealing.

68% of youth who engaged in the commercial sex trade did so while homeless.

According to the Field Center, 22% of homeless youth who were sex trafficking victims were exploited on their first night of being homeless.

95% of youth who were sex trafficked reported a history of child maltreatment, with 49% reporting childhood sexual abuse, as the Field Center concluded that youth who completed high school and had the presence of a supportive adult in their lives were less likely to be victims of sex trafficking.

In an opinion piece written for the US News and World Report, Kevin Ryan, president and CEO of Covenant House, writes, “The vulnerability children experience when they are alone, hungry and without shelter on the streets makes them particularly susceptible to trafficking.” In fact, the Field Center study reports on this vulnerability in that 14% of respondents engaged in “survival sex” to meet their basic needs.

The value of these research findings is undoubtable considering our present time, when the National Network for Youth estimates that anywhere between 1.3 to 1.7 million American youth experience one night of homelessness a year with 550,000 youth being homeless for a week or longer.

Along with a current antislavery efforts – including the recent Kentucky House bill 524 which was signed into law last week stiffening penalties on traffickers and requiring that the National Human Trafficking Resource Hotline be posted in schools – these findings compel us to bring further attention to the crisis of homelessness and poverty among our youth and children if we are serious about ending the global epidemic of human trafficking.

Reducing the vulnerability of our young people of becoming modern-day slavery victims, as objects for abuse and exploitation, requires that we ensure they have a safe place to live. Addressing the root circumstances which make our fellow brothers and sisters fall subject to danger, abuse and exploitation are essential if we are truly dedicated to the cause of freedom.