Background: Human trafficking is a crime that commonly results in acute and chronic physical and psychological harm. To foster more informed health sector responses to human trafficking, training sessions for health care providers were developed and pilot-tested in the Middle East, Central America, and the Caribbean. This study presents the results of an investigation into what health care providers knew and needed to know about human trafficking as part of that training program. Methods: Participants attended one of seven two-day training courses in Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Costa Rica, Egypt, El Salvador, Guyana, and Jordan. We assessed participants’ knowledge about human trafficking and opinions about appropriate responses in trafficking cases via questionnaires pre-training, and considered participant feedback about the training post-training. Results: 178 participants attended the trainings. Pre-training questionnaires were completed by 165 participants (93%) and post-training questionnaires by 156 participants (88%). Pre-training knowledge about health and human trafficking appeared generally high for topics such as the international nature of trafficking and the likelihood of poor mental health outcomes among survivors. However, many participants had misconceptions about the characteristics of trafficked persons and a provider’s role in responding to cases of trafficking. The most valued training components included the “Role of the Health Provider,” “Basic Definitions and Concepts,” and “Health Consequences of Trafficking.”

Las evaluaciones mundiales sugieren que una proporción sustancial de los trabajadores migrantes terminan en situaciones de explotación extrema, algunos de los cuales han sido identificados como víctimas de trata de personas. Debido a que un gran número de trabajadores migrantes caen en una "zona gris" entre la trata (como es definida por el derecho internacional y nacional) y situaciones de explotación laboral, hay una buena razón para explorar las diferencias y similitudes entre las necesidades de salud de aquellos que han sido identificados como víctimas de la trata en comparación con otros migrantes que trabajan en el mismo sector de trabajo que no lo han sido. Es urgente comprender los riesgos actuales para salud y la seguridad, las formas de abuso y explotación en los diferentes sectores y las condiciones de trabajo y de vida peligrosas comunes para mejorar las estrategias de prevención y respuesta. Este es uno de los primeros estudios que explora y compara la influencia de las exposiciones de riesgo ocupacionales, entre otros, en la salud y el bienestar de las personas, comparando las experiencias de los trabajadores migrantes y las víctimas de trata en todos los sectores y regiones que lo integran. Nuestro estudio cualitativo multi-región sobre la explotación y el daño sufrido por las personas en el sector textil en Argentina, en la extracción artesanal de oro en Perú y la construcción en Kazajstán, encontró similitudes importantes en los riesgos para la salud y los retos financieros, sociales y legales en todos los sectores y regiones. En total, se entrevistó a 71 personas; de éstos, 18 fueron identificados formalmente como víctimas de trata y 53 eran trabajadores migrantes.

Background: Trafficking is a crime of global proportions involving extreme forms of exploitation and abuse. Yet little research has been done of the health risks and morbidity patterns for men, women, and children trafficked for various forms of forced labour. Methods: We carried out face-to-face interviews with a consecutive sample of individuals entering 15 post-trafficking services in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. We asked participants about living and working conditions, experience of violence, and health outcomes. We measured symptoms of anxiety and depression with the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist and post-traumatic stress disorder with the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and used adjusted logistic regression models to estimate the effect of trafficking on these mental health outcomes, controlling for age, sector of exploitation, and time in trafficking.

The Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA) has been set up pursuant to Article 36 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (“the Convention”), which entered into force on 1 February 2008. GRETA is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Convention by the parties and for drawing up reports evaluating the measures taken by each party. GRETA is composed of 15 independent and impartial experts coming from a variety of backgrounds, who have been selected on the basis of their professional experience in the areas covered by the Convention. The term of office of GRETA members is four years, renewable once. GRETA’s country-by-country monitoring deals with all parties to the Convention on an equal footing.

Globally, Colombia is regarded as a major source and transit country for trafficking in persons in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia has several conditions as a country of origin for trafficking in persons namely due to the on-going internal armed conflict, which has exacerbated lawlessness, illicit trade, and the strong presence of international criminal gangs. Moreover, Colombia’s economy has suffered severely with high unemployment rates, lack of opportunities, and increasing poverty levels with an estimated 60-65 percent of Colombians to be living below the poverty line.During this period, thousands of communities have been displaced and become extremely vulnerable to trafficking. Such cultural factors may force persons to take high risks, often on a temporary basis, to achieve their goals; which, in return, increases their vulnerability to trafficking. In addition, social and familiar influences may negatively impact upon the individual again increasing their vulnerability to trafficking. These factors combined have fueled the trafficking in persons phenomenon in Colombia; making Colombia the third country most heavily affected by the trafficking in persons phenomenon in Latin American after Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

This desk review is conducted as part of the project entitled “Stop Trafficking Now!” being implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Special Liaison Mission in Addis Ababa, the African Union Commission (AUC) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Secretariat. The project is aimed at contributing to the efforts of the AUC, IGAD and East African Community (EAC) Member States to combat trafficking in persons, consistent with the “Ouagadougou Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings Especially Women and Children” (OAP) and the AUC Initiative against Trafficking (AU.COMMIT) campaign strategies to translate the Ouagadougou Action Plan into action. The OAP is a declaration of the will and joint intent of the African Union, the European Union and their Member States to enhance their efforts to fight human trafficking. It provides specific legal and political recommendations to be implemented by the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and Member States at sub-regional, continental and global levels. It further upholds and reinforces the international and regional legal instruments on human rights, particularly the conventions and protocols on trafficking in persons, elimination of discrimination against women and protection of the rights of the child. As part of the project “Stop Trafficking Now!” a desk review is undertaken on the countertrafficking efforts by IGAD Member States (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda), EAC Member States (Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda) as well as the IGAD and EAC secretariats within the framework of the OAP, the AU.COMMIT strategy document and the recently-developed implementation matrix. A comprehensive review report is thus prepared to be shared and discussed during the launching of the AU.COMMIT campaign in the IGAD and EAC sub-regions and at a sub-regional workshop on making the OAP operational, which is organized in Djibouti from 6–8 December 2010.

Case records on identified victims of human trafficking are highly sensitive, yet the ability to share such data is critical to evidence-based practice and policy development across government, business, and civil society. We propose new methods to anonymize, publish, and explore data on identified victims of trafficking, implemented as a single pipeline producing three data artifacts: (1) synthetic microdata modelled on sensitive case records and released in their place, mitigating the privacy risk that traffickers might link distinctive combinations of attributes in published records to known victims; (2) aggregate data summarizing the precomputed frequencies of all short attribute combinations, mitigating the utility risk that synthetic data might misrepresent statistics needed for official reporting; and (3) visual analytics interfaces for parallel exploration and evaluation of synthetic data representations and sensitive data aggregates, mitigating the accessibility risk that privacy mechanisms or analysis tools might not be understandable or usable by all stakeholders. Central to our mitigation of these risks is the notion of k-synthetic data, which we generate through a distributed machine learning pipeline. k-synthetic data preserves privacy by ensuring that longer combinations of attributes are not rare in the sensitive dataset and thus potentially identifying; it preserves utility by ensuring that shorter combinations of attributes are both present and frequent in the sensitive dataset; and it improves accessibility by being easy to explain and apply. We present our work as a design study motivated by the goal of creating a new privacy-preserving data platform for the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC), transforming how the world's largest database of identified victims is made available for global collaboration against human trafficking.

This publication considers various approaches for measuring rates of human trafficking and how they have been applied in various national contexts. It also presents how different methodologies are needed to address specific regional problems and trends.

The manual goes through, step by step, various aspects of human trafficking data, whether that be data collection methodology, data collection processes, or procedures for reporting. This manual also helps educate readers on the levels of skill, training and sensitivity needed to complete this work in the best way possible.

This paper will highlight existing guidelines (especially the Migrants in Countries in Crisis Guidelines to protect migrants in countries experiencing conflict or natural disaster) that speak to the findings of our research – and connect them to wider policy developments in the migration sphere. In particular, we reference the global process of the United Nations to establish a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration, which aims to “improve the governance on migration, to address the challenges associated with today’s migration, and to strengthen the contribution of migrants and migration to sustainable development”. Our findings provide insight on important challenges to which the global compact for migration can and should speak, as well as practices and recommendations on which stakeholders can act, within or outside of the compact process.