A Not For Sale project
A map that makes modern slavery concrete and local
Human trafficking is usually described in abstract statistics: 50 million people living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021. SlaveryMap puts a place to each documented case, the job it was built to do since June 1, 2008.
Source: ILO, Walk Free and IOM, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022).
The story so far
- 2007
Not For Sale is founded
Co-founder David Batstone discovers that a Bay Area restaurant he ate at regularly was trafficking its own kitchen and wait staff. If slavery could hide inside a place he ate dinner every week, it could hide anywhere.
- June 1, 2008
SlaveryMap launches
Anyone could submit a case they had seen or uncovered, and the map grew the way an open encyclopedia grows, case by case, refined by volunteers and editors.
- 2013
The source standard is set
Credible news outlets, law enforcement records, court records, and NGO reports: the standard the map still uses today.
- March 2016
1,774 reports logged
Not long after, the original site went quiet.
- 2026
Back online
Ten years later, SlaveryMap is back, because the people who kept giving to Not For Sale never stopped believing this tool mattered.
- Next
Community submissions return
Verified investigators, researchers, and everyday abolitionists will be able to submit and help confirm new cases directly on SlaveryMap.
Give people tools, not rules, and let local action connect to a global movement.
How cases are sourced and reviewed
Every decision behind SlaveryMap starts with the same question: does this put a survivor at risk? Cases come from credible public sources, locations are never shown precisely, and Not For Sale can remove any published case it determines poses a risk.
Read the methodology →From one map to a whole model
Not For Sale’s work now runs on three tracks: people, planet, and social innovation. Internal notes from as early as 2010 were already using “people” and “planet” as working categories, years before “social innovation” had a name of its own.
SlaveryMap came first. It remains the clearest example of what social innovation means here: not a program handed down from headquarters, but a tool that puts the ability to see the problem, and to act on it, directly in people’s hands.