1
Introduction
This proceedings summarizes the presentations and discussions at the 2-day public workshop, Approaches to Estimating the Prevalence of Human Trafficking in the United States, held in Washington, D.C., in April 2019. The workshop explored current and innovative sampling methods, technological approaches, and analytic strategies for estimating the prevalence of sex and labor trafficking in vulnerable populations.
The workshop, sponsored by the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), brought together statisticians, survey methodologists, researchers, public health practitioners, and other experts who work closely with human trafficking data or with the survivors of trafficking. Participants addressed the current state of research on human trafficking, advancements in data collection, and gaps in the data. They discussed international practices and global trends in human trafficking prevalence estimation and considered ways in which collaborations across agencies and among the U.S. government and private-sector organizations have advanced counter-trafficking efforts.
DEFINING HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Human trafficking has many names and can take many forms—pimp control, commercial sex, exploitation, forced labor, modern slavery, child labor, and several others—and the definitions vary greatly across countries and cultures, as well as among researchers.
In the United States, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act1 (TVPA) is the cornerstone of counter-trafficking efforts. It provides guidance for identifying and defining human trafficking, and it authorizes legislation and appropriations for subsequent counter-trafficking measures both within and outside the federal government. First enacted in 2000, the TVPA has since been reauthorized by three administrations, and it includes a directive for the president to establish an Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking. The subsequent Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 20182 also includes provisions for victim services and plans to enhance collaboration efforts to fight trafficking abroad.
The TVPA explicitly covers both sex- and labor-related activities. It defines trafficking in persons as “(a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or (b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”
Internationally, the United Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO) have emerged as leading global voices on defining and addressing human trafficking. As part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations created 17 Sustainable Development Goals,3 each with specific and measurable targets. Target 8.7 calls for effective measures to end forced labor in all its forms by 2025, and Target 5.2 addresses violence against women, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation. The ILO, the Walk Free Foundation, and several other counter-trafficking agencies use Targets 8.7 and 5.2 as guiding principles for their research.
In her presentation (see Chapter 2), Michaëlle De Cock (International Labour Organization) explained that the ILO’s definition of forced labor consists of three critical components: performing work or service, the involuntariness of the work or lack of concern on the part of the employer (i.e., making false promises), and the menace of any penalty used to compel the person to work. The ILO definition of human trafficking differs primarily from the TVPA in that it includes forced marriage. Davina Durgana (member, Planning Committee) said global estimates from 2016 identified 40.3 million
___________________
1 Available: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ386/pdf/PLAW-106publ386.pdf.
2 Available: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-115hr2200enr/pdf/BILLS-115hr2200enr.pdf.
people who were victims of modern slavery; that figure includes 20 million involved in forced labor and about 15 million in forced marriages.4
The ILO definition of forced labor has not changed since 1930,5 but in 2014 the organization added a forced labor supplementary protocol for preventing human trafficking and sexual exploitation, which reinforces how forced labor has changed over the years.
BACKGROUND AND IMPETUS FOR THE WORKSHOP
In her opening remarks, Dorothy Fink (OWH director and deputy assistant secretary for women’s health at HHS) explained that OWH’s mission is to provide national leadership and coordination to improve the health for women and girls through policy, education, and innovative programs that fill gaps in primary, secondary, and even tertiary prevention. She underscored the salience of reducing and preventing human trafficking victimization to her office’s goal of improving health conditions for women and girls across the United States. She noted that human trafficking is a public health issue that affects many vulnerable populations, and she stressed that the conditions to which human trafficking victims are subjected—such as dangerous work environments, exposure to communicable diseases, lack of access to adequate health care, and physical and mental abuse—can have profoundly negative implications throughout victims’ lives.
Since 2013 OWH has partnered with the Office on Trafficking in Persons (OTIP) in HHS’s Administration for Children and Families to strengthen cross-departmental initiatives to support survivors and prevent human trafficking. OWH and OTIP worked together to develop SOAR (Stop, Observe, Ask, and Respond), a training tool that teaches health care providers, public health professionals, and social and behavioral health workers how to describe the nature and scope of human trafficking, recognize the verbal and nonverbal indicators, screen and identify individuals who may have been trafficked, and assess the needs of individuals who have been trafficked in order to deliver the appropriate services.
Fink acknowledged that the response to human trafficking extends beyond the field of public health to include policy makers and practitioners in law enforcement, advocacy, foreign policy, human rights, and criminal justice. She said that the workshop’s goals aligned with a bipartisan
___________________
4 International Labour Office and Walk Free Foundation. (2017). Methodology of the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. Available: http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/publications/WCMS_586127/lang--en/index.htm.
5 C029-Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29). Available: https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C029.
congressional priority to develop more accurate and comprehensive data on the prevalence of all modern forms of human trafficking to properly combat it. In the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act of 2017, Congress authorized the National Institute of Justice to develop a methodology to assess the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States. Additionally, the House of Representatives has passed H.R. 507, the Put Trafficking Victims First Act of 2019, which includes provisions for the federal government to work together in developing methodologies to assess the prevalence of human trafficking; it awaits Senate action. Fink noted that both the 2017 act and the proposed 2019 legislation are significant for improving benchmarks, baseline data, and progress measurements to illuminate the nature and scope of human trafficking in order to develop more effective prevention strategies.
WORKSHOP CHARGE AND ORGANIZATION OF THE PROCEEDINGS
The workshop was held by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) in collaboration with the Committee on Population of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The charge to CNSTAT was to organize a workshop that brought together human trafficking researchers, health practitioners, and other experts who work closely with human trafficking data or with the survivors of trafficking to address gaps in human trafficking data, advancements in data collection, and challenges to estimating prevalence; see Box 1-1 for the full statement of task. To address this charge, CNSTAT worked closely with OWH and an interagency group of federal stakeholders to form the Planning Committee for the Workshop on Approaches to Estimating the Prevalence of Human Trafficking in the United States. In addition to covering the points mentioned in the statement of task, the interagency group raised the following points as additional topics of relevance that should be woven into the discussions:
- the lack of a consistent definition for what qualifies as human trafficking: how it varies based on context (such as victims, law enforcement, or industry), type (sex or labor), and scale (local or national);
- legal and policy barriers to the collection, sharing, and analysis of human trafficking data and potential opportunities to reduce those barriers;
- how human trafficking affects native communities;
- effectively collecting data on hard-to-reach populations;
- methods for identifying potential human trafficking victims using existing datasets or through screening for other services—looking for common risk factors;
- opportunities for data sharing across organizations and institutions; and
- examples of successful policy measures and efforts to collect, share, and analyze sensitive data in other fields and how the anti-trafficking field could learn from those areas.
This proceedings describes the workshop presentations and discussions that followed each topic. Chapter 2 addresses the challenges in identifying victims and understanding the types of vulnerabilities that increase the likelihood of victimization and that can lead to re-victimization. Chapter 3 covers a discussion among federal agency heads and an experienced federal research grantee on various approaches to measure human trafficking in the United States, and Chapter 4 discusses international human trafficking measurement approaches and research collaborations. Chapter 5 discusses the benefits and drawbacks of collecting data from victims at points of crisis, as well as methods that can be used to estimate prevalence when
self-reporting data are not available, such as multiple systems estimation. Chapter 6 covers a panel discussion on the connection between human trafficking research and policy making, and in Chapter 7 the workshop planning committee chair, David Banks, revisits the salient points from the workshop and wraps up the discussion.
This Proceedings of a Workshop has been prepared by the rapporteur as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The planning committee’s role was limited to planning and convening the workshop. The views contained in the Proceedings are those of individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all workshop participants, the planning committee, or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
