The Measurement of Child Sex Trafficking and Exploitation

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1 The Measurement of Child Sex Trafficking and Exploitation Presented by: Tracey Kyckelhahn, Ph.D. Statistician, Prosecution and Adjudication Statistics Unit Bureau of Justice Statistics Washington, DC January 4, 2012

2 Difficulties in Measuring Prevalence of HumanTrafficking Hidden crime -victims generally threatened (force, fraud, or coercion) -child victims may be especially unlikely to come forward -victims sometimes guilty of a crime (prostitution) and think they will be arrested -foreign victims especially vulnerable due to fear of deportation, fear for family in native country, fear of police 2

3 Difficulties in Measuring Prevalence of Human Trafficking (cont d) Law enforcement and prosecutors do not always recognize human trafficking as human trafficking -see victims as offenders (underage prostitutes) -victims sometimes seen complicit in crime (immigration violations, initial agreement to prostitution) -assume human trafficking is human smuggling 3

4 Difficulties in Using Court Data on Human Trafficking Databases such as the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP) collect information by statute, and can miss child sex exploitation/human trafficking cases not charged under specific statutes (Federal Prosecution of Child Sex Exploitation Offenders report and Federal Prosecution of Human Trafficking report) Requires a lot of work to go through cases retroactively to determine what cases were child sex exploitation/human trafficking Suggested solutions included analysis of commonly used non-trafficking statutes for human trafficking cases and developing estimates 4

5 TVPA 2005 reporting requirements Requires biennial reporting on nature and scope of human trafficking and the commercial sex industry in the U.S. using available data Requires reporting on dollar value of sex industry 5

6 Human Trafficking Reporting System 6

7 Data sources Data for the HTRS came from the BJA task forces -Approximately 40 human trafficking task forces provided data -Task forces comprised of local law enforcement, U.S. Attorneys, victim service providers, sometimes others (e.g., other federal agencies such as the FBI) -Data usually entered by local law enforcement 7

8 Human Trafficking in the US For the purposes of HTRS, human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for one of three purposes: 1. Labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery. 2. A commercial sex act through the use of force, fraud or coercion. 3. Any commercial sex act, if the person is under 18 years of age, regardless of whether any form of coercion is involved. 8

9 Type of data collected by the HTRS Incident information-any suspected incident investigated for at least an hour; type of trafficking, whether the incident was confirmed as human trafficking, number of suspects, number of victims, investigating agencies Suspect information-demographic information, arrests, charges, prosecutions, sentencing Victim information-demographic information, continued presence/visa requests, victim service provisions 9

10 Child sex exploitation in the HTRS, Between January 2008 and June 2010: Of the 2,515 human trafficking incidents opened for investigation, 1,016 (40%) involved suspected sexual exploitation of a child. 248 confirmed victims of sex trafficking 17 or younger in high quality task forces 10

11 Problems with HTRS data and the task force model Some task forces not very active -Some not active in any capacity (investigation, training, outreach, data entry) -Some active in investigation or training but data entry considered unimportant -Staff turnover could change data entry (train new staff, new person may be less motivated than previous point of contact) -Some task forces enter in initial investigation data but don t follow up on arrests, victim and suspect data, etc. 11

12 Problems with HTRS data and the task force model (cont d) Location of task force and priorities of law enforcement agency biased data -Some agencies had priorities that affected type of human trafficking focus (underage prostitution, gangs) -Those located in vice units reported a higher percent of sex trafficking than those located in other units (89% sex trafficking for vice versus 73% in other units such as intelligence) 12

13 Problems with HTRS data and the task force model (cont d) Interagency problems - Turf issues-independent agency (generally federal) operations, want to retain credit, wouldn t share data on cases with local law enforcement so not entered into HTRS (known to be a problem with child sex exploitation operations) -Agencies do not always get along (personality conflict, differing agency goals) 13

14 Problems with HTRS data and the task force model (cont d) Data beyond law enforcement investigations -State courts not on task forces and do not always feel an obligation to provide data -Law enforcement does not always have resources to follow up on all of their cases that make it to prosecution 14

15 Bureau of Justice Statistics website: