Explained | 25% rise in human trafficking since 2019: UNODC report

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported a surge in human trafficking cases worldwide, with a 25 per cent increase noted between 2019 and 2022. The 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons highlights a sharp rise in child exploitation and forced labour, exacerbated by poverty, conflicts, and the climate crisis across 156 countries.

Key points of the report:
• The 2024 UNODC ‘Global Report on Trafficking in Persons’ is the eighth of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
• This edition of the Global Report provides a snapshot of the trafficking patterns and flows at global, regional and national levels.
• It covers 156 countries and provides an overview of the response to the trafficking in persons by analysing trafficking cases detected between 2019 and 2023.
• Women and girls continue to account for the majority of victims detected worldwide, or 61 per cent.

• Most girls, 60 per cent, continue to be trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. 
• Regarding boys, some 45 per cent are trafficked for forced labour, and another 47 per cent are exploited for other purposes, including forced criminality and begging. 
• Trafficking for forced criminality – which includes online scams – ranks third in the number of victims detected, jumping from one per cent of total victims detected in 2016 to eight per cent in 2022. 
• The global number of detected child victims increased 31 per cent in 2022 compared to 2019, with a 38 per cent rise recorded for girls.

• More boy victims have been detected in areas where increasing numbers of unaccompanied and separated children had been recorded.
• Child trafficking is also on the rise in high-income countries, often involving girls trafficked for sexual exploitation.
• African victims account for the highest number of destinations reached. At least 162 different nationalities were trafficked to 128 different destination countries in 2022. Of the cross-border flows detected, 31 per cent involved citizens of African countries. 
• Most African victims are trafficked within the continent, where displacement, insecurity and climate change are making vulnerabilities worse.

• Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, and Western European countries saw significant increases in the detection of victims compared to 2019, while countries in South America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa and the Middle East recorded increasing detections compared to 2022, but still fewer compared to the 2019 pre-pandemic period. On the other hand, countries in Central America and the Caribbean recorded a decrease when compared to 2020.

Measures to combat human trafficking
Trafficking in persons remains a global phenomenon affecting all countries, either as countries of recruitment or exploitation. The crime requires a combination of responses at all levels: global, regional, national and sub-national.

While there has been great progress in setting up national legislations, challenges remain that require adequate operational responses to address prevention, protection and prosecutions for a crime that data proves evolves and adapts to changes in society.

Through the ‘Pact for the Future’, the international community has renewed its commitment to “intensify international, regional and national efforts to take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and trafficking in persons, especially women and children, and eliminate all forms of child labour” (Pact for the Future Action 35). The implementation of the following recommendations may serve to guide those efforts in the context of the latest trafficking trends.

1) Adopt and reinforce counter-trafficking specific measures to prevent child trafficking, protect and assist child victims: As children are increasingly detected among victims of trafficking, national authorities should ensure that child protection services, including care facilities, are sensitised and equipped to detect and refer cases of child exploitation and pay particular attention to children’s vulnerabilities to being trafficked. The international community should reinvigorate campaigns to end child labour in all its forms and to eliminate child, early and forced marriage, as well as support the adoption of national legal frameworks to address these issues.

2) Broaden the counter-trafficking institutional framework and understanding: The international community and national authorities need to conceptualise and design new anti-trafficking frameworks tailored to other forms of trafficking, including forced labour and forced criminality.

3) Improve the identification of victims and their protection: In order to detect trafficking in persons in its various forms and identify victims, the role of a wider range of stakeholders needs to be recognised. This would contribute to supporting the efforts of criminal justice practitioners in addressing the crime and support in bringing assistance and providing protection to victims. National authorities should provide labour inspectors and social workers with the tools and indicators to integrate trafficking as a serious threat to workers and refer suspicious cases to the appropriate services.

4) Reinforce the criminal justice response to trafficking in persons, especially in some regions: While most regions have recorded increasing detections and convictions since 2020, such as Africa, where new legislation was enacted, some regions have not yet recovered to their pre-COVID levels, including in some middle and high-income countries.

The international community and national authorities should analyse legislation and judicial practice in selected countries in order to understand the obstacles to successful prosecutions. National authorities should develop public-private partnerships, particularly with tech companies, to deprive traffickers of access to the technical infrastructure that is required to commit these forms of trafficking, as well as with the financial sectors to enhance the tracking of financial flows and gather digital evidence during investigations.

5) Prevention of trafficking in persons should adopt a multi-layered approach to tackle the drivers of the proliferation of trafficking activity: While awareness-raising initiatives that are context, public and vulnerability-specific may have a preventive effect on trafficking, other measures addressing root causes for trafficking in persons, or interventions tailored to sectors that can be breeding grounds for trafficking in persons could also be considered.

National authorities should consider legal channels for refugee movement and broadening the scope of regular pathways for migrants that foster safe and dignified journeys for people who need to move across borders.

6) More usable data and more precise analysis to understand and report on trafficking in persons: At the national level, many countries struggle to harmonise disparate data collected from different stakeholders/organisations involved in the counter-trafficking response.

Data harmonisation can also serve as a powerful tool for combating trafficking in persons at the international level. When data can be harnessed in an effective, standardised way from a variety of sources, particularly those with more access to the communities affected and more experience and knowledge about the nature of the crime, there is great potential to expand the evidence base.