Report: 40 million live in slavery, 125 million in child labor

Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Forty million people worldwide are enslaved and another 125 million kids work child labor jobs, new research compiled by three organizations indicates.

The non-governmental activist group Walk Free Foundation, the intergovernmental agency International Labor Organization and the United Nations' International Office for Migration presented the statistics during the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The combined efforts and databases are the first unified effort to present the full scope of world slavery.

The research estimates that women account for 71 percent of all people live under slavery. Of the 40 million enslaved people, about 25 million are engaged in forced labor and another 15 million are in forced marriages.

The International Labor Organization released a companion paper indicating that of the 125 million people age 5 to 17 in child labor, nearly 71 percent work in agriculture. The rest are in service or industrial sectors of their country's economies.

The number of laboring children represents one in ten kids worldwide, the International Labor Organization said.

"It is the first time in history that there is a united number," Andrew Forrest, Walk Free's chairman, said. "There can now longer be any denial that, as [British Prime Minister] Theresa May puts it, the greatest scourge affecting humanity right now is modern slavery."