Introduction
Human trafficking is the exploitation of human beings through forced labor or slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation. It occurs both across and within national borders and can affect men, women, and children. Although the global and regional impact of trafficking is difficult to measure, data do show that it is on the rise in many areas and that women and girls are particularly vulnerable. Of those individuals trafficked in South and Southeast Asia, women and girls make up about 77% of victims trafficked for labor and 64% of victims trafficked for sexual exploitation.
At its core, human trafficking is motivated by economic drivers and is exacerbated by weak enforcement of laws and policies aimed to protect women and children, specifically in the areas of working conditions, minimum working age, school enrollment, and migration. Law enforcement deficiencies and corruption among domestic criminal justice systems, within a context of weak transnational cooperation, can also make it nearly impossible to detect and shut down the supply chains that facilitate trafficking.
Human trafficking is a major international legal and policy priority, and is the subject of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. National legislation operationalizing these international instruments is also on the rise, and approximately 90% of countries that have signed on to the Protocol have also adopted the requisite national anti-trafficking legislation. These laws aim to address issues of transnational legal cooperation and mutual legal assistance, as well as victim protection and improved law enforcement practices, to properly identify and protect trafficking victims.
This project aims to assess a variety of programmatic and policy approaches to human trafficking, with a particular focus on measurable, proven results. Although it is difficult to measure impacts of specific programs on rates of trafficking, the three pillars of anti-trafficking efforts—prevention, protection, and prosecution—create a useful guide for assessing impacts of various interventions. These pillars lead to indicators such as awareness-raising activities among vulnerable populations, shelters for protection and rehabilitation of victims, and law enforcement and prosecution data, to determine project effectiveness. Good practices in the areas of labor trafficking and sex trafficking are considered, with a wide range of target populations and approaches, to present a broad and useful picture of anti-trafficking programming and policy around the world.