Met chief Sir Mark Rowley announces new crackdown on traffickers

An estimated 25 million people worldwide are victims of labour and sex trafficking, according to the United Nations, with concerns growing that more will fall prey as support services are halted and efforts to secure justice are hindered.

"The difficulty is that trafficking is now even more underground and less visible," said Siobhan Mullally, the recently-appointed U.N. special rapporteur on human trafficking.

In the image: Two former domestic workers from Sierra Leone in Beirut, Lebanon. Lebanon accounts some 250,000 migrant women from African and Asian countries and working in private households.

From India to Cambodia, workers in sectors such as textiles and tourism have lost their livelihoods due to COVID-19 and resorted to taking out loans that can lead to debt bondage or accepting work on worse terms and in exploitative conditions.

Many of the world's estimated 164 million migrant workers are stranded abroad and unable to go home or unwilling to seek help due to closed borders and restrictive immigration policies, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers, according to Mullally.

Extreme poverty will rise for the first time this century, the World Bank said last week, predicting that the COVID-19 fallout could spawn 115 million "new poor" this year alone.

Ilias Chatzis, head of the trafficking unit at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), cited the example of children spending more time online and being vulnerable to sexual exploitation - remotely - by global predators.

Europol said in May that online child sex abuse in the European Union spiked at the start of the pandemic.