Labor Trafficking by Forced Criminality

Some children and youth are trafficked through forced criminality, meaning they are made to commit crimes as a form of labor. This can include selling or transporting drugs, shoplifting, burglary, or financial fraud. Trafficking into sexual labor can also be a form of forced criminality, where young people are forced or coerced into commercial sex acts that are illegal under the law.

In both situations, traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to exert control, often threatening arrest, jail time, or deportation if the youth refuse. While these acts may appear to be criminal behavior, in reality these young people are victims – coerced into committing crimes for someone else’s benefit.

Gang Involvement and Violence

In some cases, gangs play a direct role in human trafficking, using intimidation or violence to recruit young people or keep them trapped in trafficking situations. For many youth, this combination of violence and gang involvement makes it even more dangerous to seek help or escape exploitation. As part of this control, gangs may also force youth to participate in crimes such as drug sales, theft, or carrying weapons, blurring the line between trafficking and gang activity. These dynamics can increase mistrust of authorities and make it harder for youth to be recognized as victims rather than offenders.

Why This Matters for Identification and Response

Forced criminality and peer recruitment are often hidden or misunderstood aspects of trafficking. Without awareness, young people can be overlooked, mislabeled, or even punished when they should be protected. Recognizing these patterns helps law enforcement, schools, and communities identify victims earlier, provide appropriate services, and disrupt the tactics traffickers use to exploit children and youth. Addressing these forms of trafficking is essential to ensuring no young person falls through the cracks.

Introducing the Five-Year Strategic Plan

Child trafficking is a complex issue rooted in poverty, racism, and other systemic inequities. While Los Angeles County has taken important steps to improve identification, intervention, and survivor support, thousands of vulnerable children and youth still face significant barriers to safety and recovery.

To address this, Los Angeles County has developed a Five-Year Strategic Plan to Prevent and Address Child Trafficking. This comprehensive plan is a call to action for systems, service providers, and communities to create a county where every young person is safe, supported, and free from exploitation. Building on past efforts, it identifies where gaps remain and offers new, innovative ways to move forward.

The Plan is guided by three key goals:

• Goal 1: Reduce the number of youth and families impacted by human trafficking.
• Goal 2: Improve youth and family well-being and healthy youth development.
• Goal 3: Promote healthy family environments and social connectedness.

At its core, the Plan focuses on preventing the exploitation of all youth by supporting and uplifting the strengths of families and communities across the County.

Community Collaboration

The Plan was developed by experts across multiple sectors in Los Angeles County, such as public health, child welfare, health services, probation, and mental health agencies, along a wide range of community-based organizations, parents, and youth. Over 80 youth and family members contributed their voices, insights, and expertise through listening sessions, helping to ensure the Plan is grounded in real-world needs and lived experiences—particularly those of young people directly impacted by trafficking. This collaborative effort was further supported by guidance provided from the Los Angeles County Child Trafficking Steering Committee, the National Center for Youth Law, the Preventing and Addressing Child Trafficking (PACT) Project, the Commercially Sexually Exploited Children (CSEC) Action Team, and the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Marymount University.

The Plan is centered on building protective factors at the individual, familial, and community level—recognizing that preventing child trafficking requires not only addressing risk but also strengthening the environments that keep children safe and supported.

Our Approach

The Strategic Plan takes a three-pronged approach to preventing and addressing child trafficking in Los Angeles County:

1. A Public Health and Community-Based Response
The Plan moves away from relying solely on juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Instead, it takes a public health approach that addresses the root causes of trafficking (like poverty and systemic inequities), promotes community-based solutions, and brings people and organizations together around prevention and early intervention, while also acknowledging the realities of both commercial sexual exploitation and labor trafficking. This approach includes ongoing collaboration with law enforcement agencies to promote trauma-informed, youth-centered practices that prioritize safety, trust-building, and access to services over punitive responses. It also expands engagement with community-based organizations and school districts, ensuring that children and families at risk for trafficking are connected with resources and support, and that survivors and their families have pathways to healing and recovery from exploitation.

2. A Focus on Narrative Change
The Plan is driven by the need to shift how human trafficking is understood and addressed by the public, service providers, and systems. It works to challenge harmful labels and assumptions about children and youth, and reduce stigma by recognizing that youth impacted by trafficking come from diverse backgrounds. With this in mind, the Plan encourages us to move beyond stereotypes and center youth voices in how we talk about trafficking and who receives support.

3. Grounded in Core Principles and Best Practices
The Plan is built on values that ensure the response to trafficking is thoughtful, inclusive, and centered on healing. These guiding principles are reflected throughout the Plan’s goals and strategies:

• Equity, Inclusion, and Intersectionality: Making sure all youth are treated fairly, and that support takes into account the different challenges they may face because of their race, gender, income, disability or other aspects of who they are.
• Healthy Youth Development and Self-Determination: Supporting every young person’s right to thrive and to define their own path
• Ethical and Authentic Youth and Lived-Experience Engagement: Involving youth and families in real and respectful ways, not just for show.
• Trauma-Informed Care: Understanding how trauma affects people and creating safe, supportive spaces where they can heal.
• Harm Reduction: Making space for youth to define what safety looks like for them and supporting safer options without judgment or punishment.
• Intergenerational Approaches: Supporting not just youth, but their families and communities, to break cycles of harm and promote healing across generations.