The European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT) is a permanent security initiative running in a four-year cycles and driven by EU member States to identify, prioritize, and address threats by organized and serious international crime. The current 2022-2025 EMPACT cycle defines the disruption of criminal networks engaged with human trafficking as one of its top priorities. Human trafficking is a complex crime that exploits people for profit and it should have no place in today’s society. People of all genders, ages, and background can become victims in this crime. Traffickers take advantage of people who are desperate and vulnerable or simply looking for a better life. In every region of the world, including Europe.
Human Trafficking Facts
In January 2023, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published the 7th edition of the global report on trafficking in persons in 2022 summarizing trends, findings and possible responses. Very recently, in February 2023, Eurostat additionally published updated statistics and a news article “Victims of trafficking of human being up 10% in 2021”. The numbers are still alarming. More than half of the victims of trafficking in the EU in 2021 were females (68%). The most common form of trafficking with 56% is sexual exploitation. Labour exploitation is the second most common form and steadily growing achieving 28% in 2021. 35% of the registered victims were children. 15% were from other EU country than the reporting one; 41% were non-EU-nationals.
Ghada Waly, the executive director of UNODC, gets in this context right to the point: “We must do better.”
Temporal Slowdown During the Covid-19 Pandemic
What seems to be a promising finding has unclear roots. Pandemic-related restrictions of movement may have temporally reduced human trafficking. Another explanation may be that human trafficking has moved further underground making it less likely it would come to the attention of authorities. While in 2020, the number of registered victims of human trafficking – both globally and in the EU –decreased, the trend reversed again in 2021.
Overall, the proportion of female victims is still dominating (2 out of 3 victims were female) although there is a notable decreasing trend in comparison to previous years. The primary form of exploitation in 2021 was still sexual exploitation with 56% although there is a decreasing trend in favour of the increase in forced labour/services.
Highly concerning are the facts that authorities are “too often failing to detect and protect trafficking victims, and to give them justice” and that “most victims rescue themselves – instead of being proactively identified”. The discovery patterns for trafficking cases in the period 2012-2022 are unequivocal: the majority, 41% of the registered cases, were the result of action by the victims themselves who manage to escape and to reach out to authorities on their own initiative. Further 21% are initiated by the victims’ families or the community, which again underlines the increased importance of raising awareness of human trafficking in the society.
War and Conflict Create Hunting Grounds for Traffickers
Since the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, the number of Ukrainian victims detected in Western Europe have risen enormously. According to the UNODC report, “analysis shows a relationship between the people forced to flee Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 as a result of the conflict in the eastern part of the country, and increased detection of trafficking in persons from Ukraine to Western and Central Europe in the following years.” Similar trend is expected to occur following the current conflict.
There were no known cases of human trafficking in the context of the war against Ukraine according to the OSCE Conference of the Alliance against Trafficking in Persons in April 2022. Many European countries proactively ran public campaigns to increase awareness of the potential risks and addressing the Ukrainian displaced population directly, which was an absolutely necessary step and a result of the EU Anti-trafficking Plan to protect people feeling form Ukraine followed by many public and humanitarian organizations and law enforcement authorities. Still, more has to be done to counter the expected rise in human trafficking. Each and everyone from us is required – policy-makers, public and governmental organizations, humanitarian organizations and NGOs, data and technology providers, and the general public.
Human Trafficking and the Internet
Human trafficking is a highly profitable crime. The European Commission (EC) estimates the annual revenues derived from human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation (the most common form of human trafficking) to up of €14 billion in the EU only. Therefore, it’s not surprising that criminal networks adapt quickly to digitalization and use the Internet to both approach new victims and to attract customers. According to UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (2020), “[t]echnology is used not only for sexual exploitation but also to coerce victims into crime and forced labour, and to advertise the selling of kidneys from victims they have trafficked.” Over the years, traffickers changed the internet platforms from classified webpages via free-standing webpages to social media. The high dynamics and usage of social media platforms makes them highly attractive to criminal business activity for both the active and passive recruitment of victims but also to easily link up with clients interested in an exploitative service.
What Can Technology Do?
Technology can play a crucial role in preventing and disrupting human trafficking. The potential is enormous: from the analysis of communication patterns and network analysis to reveal hidden networks, via image and video based detection of potential exploited victims and scene recognition and localization to satellite imagery tracking vessels carrying victims of forced labor. So, why aren’t out there more such tools? As with any humanitarian-oriented technology, there are two major stumbling stones – funding and data access. While many of the employable tools are not necessarily limited in their application to the detection of potential human trafficking, there are commonly adaptations and optimizations that have to be done to increase the efficiency and applicability for the specific domain. Technologies are rapidly evolving and data sources (especially publicly available data) are commonly subject of change in terms of availability, accessibility, and policy. A very recent negative example is the announced change in the access options to Twitter data, which will significantly impede research and the development of tools that are for the good of everyone.
Maia Rohm, PhD
Maia Rohm is a senior AI research engineer at HENSOLDT Analytics GmbH. Maia has more than 20 years of experience in standardization, content-based multimodal information retrieval, and data processing, analysis, and understanding. Her current focus of work is connecting the dots and generating insights from data.
Recommended Links
- European Commission – Organized crime and human trafficking
- Council of the EU – the fight against organized crime
- Eurostat
- EUROPOL, EU Policy Cycle – EMPACT
- Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime
- The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC) – Global data hub on human trafficking
- Tech Against Trafficking
Banner image by Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay.
