Ivividly remember the day in 2009 when I sat among a group of survivors of human trafficking gathered in Washington by Polaris Project, the NGO I then headed. They were all women sharing with one another the progress and setbacks they had had in the course of the previous year. An animated woman from Malawi, victimized as a domestic servant, pointedly interjected how curious it was that Americans seemed so interested in protecting the rights of animals, when people like her were treated worse than animals.

She captured the essence of the crime of trafficking: it dehumanizes. This affects women in forced labor as well as the sex trade. And it exists surreptitiously in the United States and in other developed countries, not just far away in the developing world.

Enlarging the dignity and progress of humanity depends on asking both why fighting human trafficking is essential to the state of women’s rights globally, and what vital role gender equality plays in solving the problem of human trafficking.

First, human trafficking is not about migration. Much as “trafficking” sounds like a description of illicit movement across borders, and often does involve migration, conceptually and legally someone who has never left their country of birth, never crossed a border, can be a human trafficking victim. A woman of the disadvantaged Dalit caste (formerly known as “Untouchables”), spending every day of her life in India, trapped in unpaid bonded labor in a rice mill, with no meaningful choice or ability to leave the situation, is a human trafficking victim. So too is a runaway teenager in the US from a broken family prostituted in an American city. Human trafficking is, in short, the exploitative robbery of someone’s autonomy.

Second, trafficking of women is not confined to sexual exploitation. The early campaign movement against human trafficking in the late 1990s focused on commercial sex, seized with the need to address the huge flow of victims from the former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics. But many women are trafficked for labor, and not solely sexual exploitation. In 2007, I met a group of young women in a shelter outside Bangkok who had left Burma for Thailand in search of a better economic and political life, when wooed in a group of eight hundred young workers by labor recruiters in Burma.