Overview of The 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report

The U.S. Department of State recently released its annual 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, which is a leading comprehensive resource of anti-human trafficking efforts around the globe. This report analyzes human trafficking trends, highlights promising interventions, grades government responses, and, importantly, “exemplifies the United States’ longstanding bipartisan commitment to combating human trafficking.”[1]

As we have highlighted in analyses of previous years’ reports (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020), the report underscores the pervasiveness and variety of human trafficking globally. The 2024 report specifically focuses on the increasing intersection of digital technology and human trafficking, while also underpinning promising and needed solutions in cross-sector collaboration—including the unique role of communities and NGOs to implement survivor-informed anti-exploitation efforts and services. 

Here are key points from the 2024 report.

Global Law Enforcement Data

According to participating governments’ law enforcement data, human trafficking instances, prosecutions, and convictions have overall increased over the past 7 years. Variations in these trends did occur during the COVID pandemic years, particularly 2020 and 2021. See the report for additional regional breakdowns.

Global Law Enforcement Data
Year	Prosecutions	Labor Prosecutions	Convictions	Labor Convictions	Victims Identified	Labor Victims Identified	New or Amended Legislation
2017	17,471	869	7,135	332	96,960	23,906	5
2018	11,096	457	7,481	259	85,613	11,009	5
2019	11,841	1,024	9,548	498	118,932	13,875	7
2020	9,876	1,115	5,011	337	109,216	14,448	16
2021	10,572	1,379	5,260	374	90,354	21,219	15
2022	15,159	2,670	5,577	528	115,324	24,340	27
2023	18,774	3,684	7,115	1,256	133,943	42,098	14

 

Western Hemisphere Law Enforcement Data
Year	Prosecutions	Labor Prosecutions	Convictions	Labor Convictions	Victims Identified	Labor Victims Identified	New or Amended Legislation
2017	1,571	139	969	114	10,011	2,139	1
2018	1,252	72	1,017	177	11,683	2,370	0
2019	1,324	101	843	34	12,352	273	0
2020	910	55	588	27	11,100	626	2
2021	1,382	120	794	49	12,343	1,040	4
2022	1,232	114	256	70	11,676	1,419	12
2023	1,387	180	873	108	18,292	3,656	4

 

The Impacts of Digital Technology on Human Trafficking

Digital technology encompasses ever-expanding electronic systems and resources, such as computers, mobile apps, AI, websites, video streaming, and social media. Increasingly, trafficking victims and survivors report first connecting with their traffickers online. Likewise, countries report drastic increases in online trafficking—including demand for and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)—as traffickers use technology to recruit, control, market, and exploit vulnerable individuals while also evading detection. 

Simultaneously, however, technology also fuels innovations to better prevent human trafficking, protect victims, and prosecute traffickers.

THE PROBLEM: Digital technology has broadened the scope, scale, and speed of trafficking operations.

Traffickers use the internet to identify and anonymously target those in vulnerable situations (e.g. conflict zones, poverty, challenging home lives, and systemic oppression). They use fake accounts on social media, online advertisements, websites, dating apps, and gaming platforms to interact with potential victims and falsely promise education, employment, housing, or romantic relationships. 

In truth, they lure victims into labor and sex trafficking situations and maintain control through threatening victims’ safety, loved ones, reputation, future employment, and financial prospects. 

• The internet also fuels sextortion—a serious crime in which perpetrators threaten to distribute private material if victims don’t provide more sexual images/favors or money. Perpetrators may also sell the sensitive material on illicit platforms.
• Traffickers also facilitate forced criminality. Recruited through deceitful job listings, perpetrators confine victims in gated communities and force them to engage in online criminal activity such as online gambling, cryptocurrency investment schemes, and romance scams—threatening violence and prosecution if they flee.

 

Law enforcement and anti-trafficking stakeholders have difficulty identifying and countering traffickers hidden behind anonymization tools and loose online regulations.

• Specific difficulties include concentrating efforts amidst a constant tech evolution, navigating diverse legal frameworks across borders, insufficient funding for research and training, and limited access to existing technology-based anti-trafficking tools.

 

SOLUTION: Global coordination among anti-trafficking stakeholders and technology experts. 

Harnessing digital technology and cross-sector data sharing and analysis can facilitate resource sharing, training, and online support services for victims and vulnerable populations. 

• Organizations are using mobile applications, social media campaigns, online hubs, and data analytic tools to help identify current trends in fraudulent recruitment, map complex supply chains for forced labor, and detect emerging human trafficking schemes.  
• Public and private collaborators have developed tools (e.g. data mining and machine learning) to analyze vast data and create accessible online platforms to enhance case management, investigations, and real-time insights. 
• Maximizing this technological potential requires improved government digital literacy, ethical practices, and encryption infrastructure to protect survivors against data breaches, enhanced NGO access to these tools, and continued investment in multidisciplinary partnerships.

 

Stakeholders can continue prioritizing prevention through education and victim services.

• Already, parents and communities can take advantage of existing online tools to promote online safety for children, who are increasingly vulnerable to exploitation in a digital world (see our recent blog for more). 
• Advocates use messaging apps, social media, and specially designed platforms to share survivor experiences, educate workers of their rights and available services, and connect survivors and workers to legitimate employers.
• Technology also amplifies victim identification, investigations, and prosecutions. Whether emerging AI tools or lower-tech messaging and phone channels, technology can help victims access resource hotlines, virtual peer community spaces, and financial inclusion resources and also bolster training and technical assistance for service providers.

 

BEST PRACTICES: Each sector has a unique role to play in both domestic and international anti-human trafficking collaboration.

The legislative and regulatory capacity of government to improve privacy, security, and innovation should include, in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders:

• Properly regulating digital platforms to protect national security, economic development, and human rights.
• Developing policies around technology production, deployment, and use. 
• Increasing government investment in anti-trafficking digital technologies. Stakeholders, including survivors, will be critical to identify the additional government-funded research and development necessary to safely deploy technology.  

 

The monitoring, investigating, and prosecuting power of law enforcement should include:

• Seeking new ways to proactively investigate trafficking cases by harnessing technological innovations to collect evidentiary material, follow digital footprints, and leverage online data.  
• Focusing internal agency capacities to integrate data analytics and AI into casework.
• Investing in staff, training, and software to monitor online platforms and develop technical knowledge. This can include establishing cybercrime units, cooperation protocols with NGO and private sector partners, and multilateral knowledge exchange to prevent traffickers from exploiting capacity gaps.
• Establishing protection standards for victims’ personal data collection and storage.

 

The corporate responsibility of the financial sector should include:

• Upholding regulatory frameworks. In generating an estimated $236 billion in illicit profits annually, human trafficking schemes often intersect with formal financial systems. Financial institutions must therefore proactively manage risk and train staff to detect trafficking indicators and laundering techniques.  
• Collaborating with justice sectors to balance technological innovations and ethical considerations to detect criminal enterprises in financial transactions. 
• Joining the Financial Action Task Force, a standard-setting body that guides more than 200 member nations to identify, assess, and mitigate money laundering and illicit finance risks.

 

The survivor-supporting role of NGOs should include:

• Using their unique existing partnerships with technology companies, governments, survivors, and community organizations to advocate for and consult on standardized response frameworks, data privacy for victims, and solutions to other emerging concerns around technology.

 

The needed investment of a responsible technology industry should include:

• Recognizing their popular, user-friendly apps and services contribute to unsafe environments by providing traffickers with easy access to communicate, advertise, and coordinate illicit activity. 
• Committing to enhanced security measures, improved content moderation, and collaboration with law enforcement to prevent illicit activity and crime.
• Investing in better language models and machine learning to provide law enforcement agencies with powerful tools to target illicit activity and investigations. The report cautions, however, that these tools should enhance existing methods with an eye toward victim protection.

 

Topics of Special Interest

Though focusing on the emerging threat—and promising solutions—of digital technology in domestic and global exploitation, the report authors also highlight additional topics for advocates and governments to consider. These include:

• The emerging, poorly understood threat of organ removal for the purposes of exploitation.
• The cultural nuances of child marriage and the need to determine intent of exploitation when developing responses.
• The promising interventions to empower workers and decrease labor trafficking, which includes “supporting, elevating, and improving labor standards, bringing workers’ voices to the policy formulation and decision-making table, and working to help the public and private sector enforce rules against unfair labor practices.”  
• The unique vulnerability of persons with disabilities, who represent about 16% percent of the world’s population, or 1.3 billion people. “On the one hand, persons with disabilities are more likely to be targeted by traffickers; on the other hand, the experience of being trafficked can lead to or exacerbate existing disabilities through physical injuries or emotional trauma that in turn could heighten vulnerability.”
• Special considerations for trafficking in the western hemisphere, which includes addressing the unprecedented irregular migration that spikes vulnerability to trafficking. Governments must improve their focus on prosecuting labor traffickers, forced criminality, state-sponsored forced labor such as Cuba’s labor export program, and cross-system screening for trafficking victims. (The report includes a framework for balancing prosecution, prevention, and victim protection in criminal justice systems that may be particularly relevant for practitioners in the U.S. and Pennsylvania.) 
• The continued state sponsorship of human trafficking that includes 13 countries with a documented “policy or pattern” of trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or child soldier recruitment: Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Turkmenistan.

 

Nation Government Rankings

Rankings reflect an assessment of government laws prohibiting and punishing trafficking, victim identification measures, funding for NGO victim services, victim protection and assistance, and measures to prevent human trafficking and reduce the demand for sexual exploitation. 

Tier-1 nations meet minimum U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) standards and demonstrate progress, while Tier 3 nations demonstrate no such commitment and consequently face financial penalties.

Conclusion

The 2024 report highlights how government is just one piece of a large network needed to address human trafficking. Individuals in every sector have a role to play—especially at the local community level. For instance, the report highlights how NGOs are the leaders in ensuring survivors access resources and support services and even help inform policy. 

Every individual can equip themselves with this global knowledge of human trafficking to promote ethical systems, educate their loved ones, and support and elevate the voices and rights of victims to determine their own restoration and rights. 

[1] “Trafficking in persons” and “human trafficking” refer to a crime whereby traffickers exploit and profit at the expense of adults or children by compelling them to perform labor or engage in commercial sex. When a person younger than 18 is used to perform a commercial sex act, it is a crime regardless of force, fraud, or coercion. The U.S. recognizes two primary forms: forced labor and sex trafficking. The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons contain similar definitions of human trafficking, using a three-element framework focused on the trafficker’s acts, means, and purpose.