More than 5,600 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing across the United States in a single year. In Canada, disappearances of Indigenous women and girls remain concentrated in the same provinces year after year. A new Thomson Reuters report, Unseen, Unknown, and Unsolved, puts hard numbers behind a crisis that has persisted in the margins of public attention for decades, and it points to where intervention must go next.

The findings are drawn from disappearance records, sex advertisement data, sex buyer forums, and Google search trend analysis across both the US and Canada. Together, they build a picture of systemic exploitation that is patterned, traceable, and in some cases preventable.

The scale of the problem

In the US, more than 84% of Indigenous women have experienced violence in their lifetime with more than 55% experiencing sexual violence. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death for Indigenous women in the country, and they are murdered at a rate 10-times higher than the national average. More distressing, only 13%of sexual assaults reported by Indigenous women actually lead to an arrest.

In Minnesota alone, 405 Indigenous women were considered missing at some point during 2024. Wyoming found that Indigenous people are missing for twice as long as non-Indigenous individuals before their cases are resolved. Washington state reported that unsolved homicide rates for Indigenous peoples run more than 2.5-times higher than for non-Indigenous populations.

More than 5,600 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing across the United States in a single year.

Canada tells a parallel story. From May 2025 through March 2026, researchers collected 38 documented disappearance events, with Manitoba, Ontario, and Alberta accounting for the majority, according to the report. The same sources reveal that 11 of the victims were under the age of 18. The average age was 28.

What the sex ad data reveals

More than 15,000 sex advertisements in the US in a single year claim to feature an Indigenous individual. In Canada, 56% of the 313 ads collected were posted in the Greater Toronto Area. In the US, California alone nearly doubled the ad volume of the next closest state, Texas, reflecting both population concentration and the largest Indigenous population of any US state.

Movement corridor analysis of Canadian data over 10 years identified Toronto to Vancouver as the single most-used city-to-city corridor for sex ad posters. Geographic distance did not constrain movement, pointing to the likelihood of air travel as a trafficking mechanism, which has direct implications for airport-based awareness and interdiction efforts.

One case in early 2026 demonstrated what this data can do in practice. Minnesota's Office of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives began cross-referencing missing persons reports with sex ad databases. An analyst matched a missing woman's photo to multiple ads in Minneapolis, and it was discovered that she had been trafficked by multiple individuals. Fortunately, she was reached through the subsequent investigation. This stiuation demonstrated that while the methodology works, the scalability of the solution is dependent on increased investments in tools and training.

The demand side nobody is addressing

Human trafficking is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world and addressing demand is central to stopping it before it starts. This means educating men and boys about the real-world consequences of behaviors that have been normalized in popular culture, including consuming sexually exploitative pornography and visiting strip clubs.

Google trends data for the search term Native American porn showed consistent, sustained search volume in the US over five years, concentrated most heavily in New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, and North Dakota. The consistency of that search volume signals ongoing new demand rather than a static user base.

Human trafficking is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world and addressing demand is central to stopping it before it starts.

In addition, the demand shows up in sex buyer forums, in which men post explicitly about targeting Indigenous women. In one documented Canadian thread, a buyer stated a preference for Indigenous women specifically because he perceived a lower risk of law enforcement involvement if they were victimized.

‍What must change

These patterns of exploitation are documented, the buyers are on record, and the methodology to find victims has been proven. What remains is the policy and institutional response that those findings demand. Recommendations from the report include:

• Standardize sex ad analysis in investigations of missing Indigenous women and girls — The Minnesota case proved the methodology works, and it needs to move from experimental to standard operations across law enforcement agencies in both the US and Canada.
• Invest in data collection infrastructure — The gap in data collection investment must close at the federal level and be reinforced at the state and provincial level.
• Prioritize urban areas that are undercounting Indigenous victims — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Toronto all had high sex ad volumes relative to their Indigenous populations, pointing to likely systemic under-counting of Indigenous vicitims in those cities.
• Document substance abuse as a coercive mechanism — Drug-facilitated exploitation can establish force, fraud, or coercion in a courtroom. There needs to be a focus on the networks behind the addiction rather than on the victims.
• Fund and replicate demand-reduction programs — Organizations like EmpowerMen in Winnipeg, Canada are doing the work of addressing the buyer-side of this equation. Their models need funding, study, and replication in other communities across both countries.
• ‍

Patches of data exists to clearly chronicle the huge problem of sex trafficking that leads to missing or murdered Indigenous women. What remains is the institutional knowledge and capacity to treat these human rights crimes as the crisis the numbers say it is.

You can access the new Thomson Reuters report, Unseen, Unknown, and Unsolved, here‍