Some of it may be actual slavery. Some of it may be voluntary prostitution. Some of it may be in between (women who would rather not be prostitutes, but have no other skills, or who are too dysfunctional, whether from addiction or mental issues, to hold a regular job).
We don't know, and some people have an incentive to inflate the actual numbers.
I'm not buying that. There is a distinction between "actual slavery" or human trafficking, and prostitution, and law enforcement knows which is which.
Human trafficking is a product of Orange County’s huge immigrant population, legal as well as illegal.
Legals have brought over young women from their home countries and kept them imprisoned in their homes. The girls don’t know our culture, they don’t speak English, they haven’t got any contact with the outside world anyway.
One instance I remember some legals owned an apartment building and had turned it into a defacto prison/brothel with a lot of young women from back home. They had a high wire fence around the whole thing. The culprits who do this have been Asians and Middle Easterners, often rich themselves. Despite the BS we are always told these immigrants aren’t here to become just like us, they bring their old culture here and it can be ugly.
Mexican and Central American girls have been smuggled into Orange County forever. I first heard about it in the 1960s when I was in high school. The girls are controlled by fear. They are threatened, their families are threatened. They are afraid of going to jail. This is real common.
This is a product of the open border, of refusing to halt illegal immigration, of importing alien cultures that think nothing of exploiting vulnerable young women. It’s not voluntary prostitution like some on this thread want to believe it is.