Individuals in the United States vulnerable to human trafficking include: children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, including foster care; runaway and homeless youth; unaccompanied foreign national children without lawful immigration status; individuals seeking asylum; American Indians and Alaska Natives, particularly women and girls; individuals with substance use issues; migrant laborers, including undocumented workers and participants in visa programs for temporary workers; foreign national domestic workers in diplomatic households; persons with limited English proficiency; persons with disabilities; LGBTI individuals, and victims of intimate partner violence or domestic violence.
Trafficking in Persons Report 2020
Last Thursday, the Trafficking in Persons Report 2020 was released by the U.S. Department of State. This report, and its valuable human trafficking statistics, is a crucial tool in fighting human trafficking around the globe.
What is the Trafficking in Persons Report?
The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report is an annual report produced by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, a part of the U.S. Department of State. The TIP Office was created by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. This office’s main duty is to engage foreign governments in addressing human trafficking through the preparation of the TIP report.
This 570-page report describes the prevalence of human trafficking, including sex and labor trafficking, in many countries. This information is collected from US embassies around the world.
Each country is assigned to one of four tiers based on the government’s efforts to combat human trafficking. Tier One countries have made an effort to address the problem to combat human trafficking and fully meet the TVPA’s standards for the elimination of trafficking. Tier Two countries are making significant efforts to meet the TVPA’s standards. Governments on the Tier Two Watch List are also making significant efforts to meet these standards, but have a significant number of trafficking victims and fail to provide evidence of increasing efforts to meet the TVPA standards. Tier Three countries do not fully meet these standards and are not making any significant efforts to meet them.
Countries in Tier Three face funding restrictions, such as foreign assistance funds or funding for educational and cultural exchange programs.
Read the full TIP Report 2020.
What can we learn from the TIP Report? Human Trafficking in 2020
First, each country narrative provides in-depth explanations of the steps that foreign governments have taken to prevent human trafficking, to protect victims, and to prosecute traffickers. You can also see how individual countries have performed in past years. For example, below is Afghanistan’s tier ranking for the past eight years.
The first 70 pages of the report describe its history and the standards used to evaluate countries. Particularly helpful is the TVPA’s definition of “severe forms of trafficking in persons”:
- sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or
- 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.
Lastly, the report includes several illustrative victim stories. Below are several of them.
Domestic Servitude in Colombia
“Veronica left her indigenous community in Colombia for a domestic service position in the capital city, Bogotá. After arriving, her employer told her she would need to work for two months without a salary to repay her relocation expenses. Later, her employer forced Veronica to work for two years without pay as punishment for breaking a decorative vase in the home. She had to work 12-hour days and her movements were constantly restricted. After she escaped and a prosecutor brought charges against Veronica’s employer, the court ruled that Veronica was a victim of domestic servitude and a survivor of human trafficking.”
Forced Labor in India
“Madhu was thrilled when recruiters arrived in his Northern Indian village offering him easy, flexible work at a factory in Bangalore. After moving, he quickly realized the factory owners had lied about what his role and work conditions would be. Forbidden from leaving his work site, Madhu had no choice but to work 12-hour shifts packaging chemicals under hazardous conditions. While the factory owners paid Madhu a small daily salary, they physically threatened him, forced him to work when ill, and restricted all his movements for four years. When local police learned he was not allowed to return home or travel without consent from his employer, they required the factory owners to release him. Madhu returned to his village, but law enforcement have not pressed charges against the factory.”
Sex Trafficking in Nigeria & Ghana
“When Patience’s parents passed away, she took on the burden of caring for her six younger siblings and needed to find a job. A recruiter convinced her to leave Nigeria for better opportunities in Ghana. Once she arrived in a major city in Ghana, the recruiter demanded $1,500 for the cost of transportation and turned her over to a madam who used a local fetish priest to perform a ritual that obligated her to repay the debt. The trafficker then forced Patience to engage in commercial sex to repay her so-called debt for her travel to Ghana. She was threatened and told that if she refused, the priest would place a curse on her and she would be killed.”
Human Trafficking Statistics 2020
These are just a few of the stories of human trafficking victims included in the report.
The TIP Report is an invaluable tool to bring to light the prevalence of human trafficking around the globe and to hold countries accountable for their role in fighting this violation of human rights. These human trafficking statistics help governments and NGOs in their fight against human trafficking. You can ensure that the TIP office and its programs continue to receive the funding they need to produce this report by contacting your representatives in Congress to voice your support.
Read more about the fight against human trafficking:
human trafficking statistics 2020
human trafficking statistics 2020
human trafficking statistics 2020
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