New U.S. Reports on Human Trafficking

The Government Accountability Office in the United States recently published 2 reports on human trafficking:

Human Trafficking: Monitoring and Evaluation of International Projects Are Limited, but Experts Suggest Improvements:

"The UN General Assembly passed a resolution in December 2006 recognizing that broad international cooperation is essential for combating trafficking, and UNODC launched the Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking in March 2007. In two of the three countries we visited, we found that host governments—which bear ultimate responsibility for combating trafficking within their borders—have passed national antitrafficking laws and enacted national action plans. However, organizations continue to face numerous challenges when collaborating to combat human trafficking, including varying levels of government commitment and capacity (...) "

"A GAO-convened panel of experts identified and discussed ways to address the factors that make it difficult to monitor and evaluate antitrafficking projects (...) To improve information on the nature and severity of human trafficking, panelists suggested several sampling methods that have been used to sample other hard-to-reach populations, including the homeless, hidden migrants, missing and exploited children, and domestic violence victims. One suggested method is sampling of 'hot spots'—an intensive search for victims in areas known to have high concentrations of victims or in areas to which many victims return.

Human Trafficking: A Strategic Framework Could Help Enhance the Interagency Collaboration Needed to Effectively Combat Trafficking Crimes:

"Federal [i.e U.S.] agencies have coordinated investigations and prosecutions of trafficking crimes across agencies on a case-by-case basis, but their approaches to expand the scope of efforts to combat trafficking could benefit from an overall strategic framework to help enhance and sustain interagency collaboration on trafficking in persons. Agencies have described their coordination as reactive, and coordination has occurred as determined by the needs of individual cases and the established relationships among law enforcement officials across agencies (...) These included developing coordinated proactive approaches to identify trafficking victims; intelligence gathering; analysis of trafficking patterns; and expanding outreach to non-law-enforcement agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and other law enforcement agencies. However, the current coordinating mechanisms do not address the interagency collaboration needed for this level of expanded effort, and individual agency plans only address individual agency goals linked to agency missions—none of which is linked to a common governmentwide outcome for investigations and prosecutions of trafficking crimes. Additionally, while no single agency can bring traffickers to justice, agencies have differing views on leadership of U.S. efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking and information sharing policies. Our previous work has shown that a strategic framework that, at a minimum, includes agencies working together toward a common outcome with mutually reinforcing strategies; agreed-on roles and responsibilities; and compatible polices, procedures, and other means to operate across agency boundaries can help enhance and sustain collaboration among federal agencies dealing with issues, such as trafficking in persons, that are national in scope and cross agency jurisdictions."

Earlier Library Boy posts that deal with human trafficking are referred to in the June 27, 2007 item entitled Annual U.S. State Department Report on Human Trafficking.