  Human trafficking is a global epidemic affecting millions of people across
the planet. Sex trafficking, the dominant form of human trafficking, has seen a
significant rise mostly due to the abundance of escort websites, where human
traffickers can openly advertise among at-will escort advertisements. In this
paper, we take a major step in the automatic detection of advertisements
suspected to pertain to human trafficking. We present a novel dataset called
Trafficking-10k, with more than 10,000 advertisements annotated for this task.
The dataset contains two sources of information per advertisement: text and
images. For the accurate detection of trafficking advertisements, we designed
and trained a deep multimodal model called the Human Trafficking Deep Network
(HTDN).
