Only 10% of alleged trafficking cases in the US confirmed

I’ve been writing about the idea of evidence of trafficking and questioning what people think constitutes evidence. In a discussion of a post of mine called Sex trafficking v Prostitution: Judging the evidence, someone said ‘when you bring up this contradiction, you are the equivalent of a holocaust denier in some people’s eyes’. So there was a certain amount of rough stuff in the comments after that post was taken up by Sociological Images.

Now the US government’s Justice Department has released figures on human trafficking cases in the US between January 2007 and October 2008. The Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS) looks like a sensible way to assess the TVPA (Trafficking Victims Protection Act). The press release is below, the whole report can be downloaded, and this is the key finding:

As of September 30, 2008, less than 10 percent of the 1,229 alleged incidents had been confirmed as human trafficking. To be confirmed in the HTRS, the case must have led to an arrest and been subsequently confirmed by law enforcement, or the victims must have received a special non-immigrant Visa classification, as provided under the 2000 TVPA.

I understand from reading the full report that we should not understand that the TVPA is useless or that trafficking isn’t a problem – and this post is not trying to say that. Here is the report’s disclaimer, which also makes sense.

Data in this report represent a snapshot of the investigations opened by 38 federally funded human trafficking task forces. Because these task forces were not selected to be statistically representative, the data do not represent all incidents of human trafficking nationwide. . . While attempts were made to collect complete data from all federal task forces, many task forces began collecting data only recently and were able to provide only partial counts of human trafficking cases for the specified period.

However I think we may take it as indicative of something weak in the programme that so few cases have managed to be proven. There could be many reasons for this, and possibly poor definitions and understandings of ‘trafficking’ are among them. It is extremely difficult to prove culpability when everyone’s afraid of getting in trouble, too, which is the salient characteristic of undocumented migrants.

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs,
US Department of Justice Press Release, 15 January 2009

More than 1,200 Alleged Incidents of Human Trafficking Reported in the U.S.

In the first 21 months of operation, the Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS) recorded information on more than 1,200 alleged incidents of human trafficking, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The HTRS contains data collected by 38 federally funded human trafficking task forces on alleged incidents of human trafficking that occurred between January 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), and its reauthorizations in 2003, 2005, and 2008 define a human trafficking victim as a person induced to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud, or coercion. Any person under age 18 who performs a commercial sex act is considered a victim of human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud, or coercion was present.

Most (83 percent) of the reported human trafficking incidents involved allegations of sex trafficking. Labor trafficking accounted for 12 percent of incidents, and other or unknown forms of human trafficking made up the remaining five percent. About a third (32 percent) of the 1,229 alleged human trafficking incidents involved sex trafficking of children.

More than a quarter of alleged sex trafficking incidents contained multiple victims, and nearly half of labor trafficking incidents had more than one victim. Labor trafficking incidents were more likely to involve more than one suspect (47 percent), compared to sex trafficking incidents (37 percent).

As of September 30, 2008, less than 10 percent of the 1,229 alleged incidents had been confirmed as human trafficking. To be confirmed in the HTRS, the case must have led to an arrest and been subsequently confirmed by law enforcement, or the victims must have received a special non-immigrant Visa classification, as provided under the 2000 TVPA.

Over 90 percent of victims in both alleged and confirmed human trafficking incidents were female. Nearly 40 percent of victims in alleged and confirmed labor trafficking incidents were male, while almost all (99%) victims in alleged and confirmed sex trafficking incidents were female.

Hispanic victims comprised the largest share (37 percent) of alleged sex trafficking victims and more than half (56 percent) of alleged labor trafficking victims. Asians made up 10 percent of alleged sex trafficking victims, compared to 31 percent of labor trafficking victims.

Approximately two-thirds of victims in alleged human trafficking incidents were age 17 or younger (27 percent) or age 18 to 24 (38 percent). Sex trafficking victims tended to be younger (71 percent were under age 25) and labor trafficking victims tended to be older (almost 70 percent were age 25 or older). Slightly more than half of all victims in alleged human trafficking incidents were U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens accounted for 63 percent of sex trafficking victims, compared to four percent of labor trafficking victims.

Nearly eight in 10 human trafficking suspects were male. A fifth of sex trafficking suspects were female, compared to about a third of labor trafficking suspects. Nearly two-thirds of sex trafficking suspects were under age 35, while nearly two-thirds of labor trafficking suspects were age 35 or older. U.S. citizens accounted for 66 percent of suspects in alleged incidents. Nearly three-quarters of sex trafficking suspects and a third of labor trafficking suspects were U.S. citizens.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-164) requires the submission of biennial reports on human trafficking using available data from state and local authorities. In response to this requirement, the Department of Justice (DOJ) funded the creation of the HTRS, which was designed by the Institute of Race and Justice at Northeastern University (NEU) and the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute (UI). The HTRS is updated monthly. The data in this report represent the status of each case as of September 30, 2008.

The report, Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 2007-08 (NCJ 224526), was written by BJS statisticians. For additional information about the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ statistical reports and programs, please visit the BJS.

Interesting, no?

4 thoughts on “Only 10% of alleged trafficking cases in the US confirmed

  1. Kris the Donkey

    This is very strange indeed. The report first defines “Any person under age 18 who performs a commercial sex act is considered a victim of human trafficking”. Then says “About a third (32 percent) of the 1,229 alleged human trafficking incidents involved sex trafficking of children”

    That means according to their own definition at least 32 percent of the alleged incidents must have been victims of human trafficking, not less than 10 percent.

    Reply
  2. Laura Agustin

    The keywords are ‘alleged’, a legal term for when it’s believed there’s been a crime but it hasn’t been proved, and ‘confirmed’, which means those carrying out the legal process have proved juridically everything necessary to be able to call the case trafficking and prosecute the perpetrator. So, whether people really were trafficked or not, investigators have been able to prove only 10% of alleged cases.

    Reply
  3. Kris the Donkey

    I read the report more carefully. I see something very peculiar in table 2; it says that of 708 of 1229 alleged cases no data was available on whether human trafficking was confirmed, in 123 cases a decision was pending. Then there remain 398 cases. In 112 cases human trafficking was confirmed, in 286 it was confirmed human trafficking did not take place, that’s 28% confirmed trafficking cases of the total number of confirmed cases.

    For sex trafficking alone the ratio is 90(trafficking)/205(no trafficking), so that’s 31%.

    In the child trafficking cases the ratio is 34/16, so that’s 68%.

    For forced prostitution the ratio is 52/181, so that’s 22%.

    So perhaps 30% is a better percentage than (less than) 10%, but remember that of the sex trafficking cases of the 630 of the 1018 alleged cases (62%) simply no data was available, perhaps these have a much higher of much lower human trafficking percentage.

    Statistics are tricky business indeed (sorry, I like numbers, but they often provide more questions than answers).

    Reply
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