Report reveals key trends in the U.S. enforcement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act

The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report was released Tuesday on the Human Trafficking Institute’s (HTI) website–www.traffickinginstitute.org. The report, a project of HTI, is a continuation of HTI’s efforts to provide comprehensive data about every criminal and civil human trafficking case that federal courts handle each year. The 2020 iteration is the first report to compile data and highlight trends for every year since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was signed into law in 2000.

The report highlights data from every federal human trafficking prosecution charged under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) from its enactment to its 20th anniversary in 2020.

This landmark law was the first federal law to criminalize human trafficking. The data from the report reveals trends in enforcement of the TVPA, following a timeline from its inception through five reauthorizations intended to enhance the U.S. government’s efforts to prevent trafficking, protect victims, and prosecute traffickers.

Since the enactment of the TVPA, federal courts handled 2,093 human trafficking prosecutions with a total of 4,132 criminal defendants. 4,824 victims were identified in federal criminal cases during the 20-year period, over half of which were children. A total of 3,169 defendants have been convicted in human trafficking cases since 2000.

“The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report provides policymakers, researchers, journalists, and nonprofit leaders with an essential tool to analyze the U.S. enforcement of anti-trafficking laws,” said Victor Boutros, HTI chief executive officer. “One government leader described it as the most reliable cross-section of human trafficking data within the United States. The 2020 report fills a major gap in data collection to support trafficking prosecutions by presenting prosecution trends since 2000. Our goal is to continue to fill the gaps in these efforts and provide a vision for this type of data collection in other countries.”

The report presents an enormous amount of data using a digestible, integrative design, organized in two parts:

1. An overview of federal human trafficking case profiles, including data about defendants, victims, types of recruitment, and methods of coercion used in forced labor and sex trafficking schemes.

2. An in-depth and data-driven analysis of criminal investigations and prosecutions for 2020, and how they stack up to the 20 prior years.

“This year’s report provides in-depth trend analyses and important context on 20 years’ worth of enforcement data that practitioners and the public alike can review to assess how far we’ve come in using the justice system to combat trafficking, and how far we still have to go,” said Lindsey Roberson, HTI director of Legal Engagement and 2020 report editor.

Highlights from the 2020 report include:

—20-Year Trends

• The federal government filed 2,093 human trafficking prosecutions against 4,132 defendants impacting over 4,824 victims since 2000.

• Prosecutors filed more sex trafficking prosecutions in 2020 than all forced labor prosecutions filed in the two decades since the enactment of the TVPA.

• The number of human trafficking convictions each year has steadily increased over time. A total of 3,169 defendants have been convicted in human trafficking cases since 2000.

• The impact of human trafficking in the United States is far-reaching, affecting people of all ages and genders, regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens or foreign nationals. Foreign nationals came from 54 different countries of origin, the majority in the Western Hemisphere.

• The domestic services industry is the most frequent source of federal forced labor prosecutions. Half of all forced labor cases prosecuted alleged traffickers compelled victims to perform domestic services like housekeeping, cooking, childcare, and other forms of labor within a household.

• Online solicitation has dwarfed other tactics used by traffickers to solicit buyers of commercial sex for over a decade, appearing as the primary form of solicitation in over twice as many criminal cases as any other method each year since 2008.

—Key Takeaways from 2020

• In 2020, there were 579 active federal human trafficking prosecutions involving 1,007 active defendants, which impacted over 1,499 victims. 94% of these were sex trafficking cases and 6% were forced labor cases.

• Prosecutors filed more human trafficking cases in 2020 than in 2019, but charged fewer defendants. The number of cases filed in 2020 increased 11% to 165 following two years of decline. In contrast, the number of defendants charged dropped to 257, down 8% from 2019.

• The internet is a major platform for traffickers to recruit sex trafficking victims and solicit buyers of commercial sex. In 2020, 83% of active sex trafficking cases involved the internet as the primary method of solicitation and 41% of victims in active sex trafficking cases were recruited online.

• Self-reporting by a victim was the most common way that a case was reported to law enforcement in 2020. Over one-third of case referrals that resulted in a prosecution involved a victim who contacted law enforcement for assistance, either directly or through the support of a non-profit or hotline.

• Federal courts convicted the lowest number of defendants in human trafficking cases in 2020 since 2012. In 2020, 163 defendants were convicted—an 89% conviction rate. This is a 51% decline in convicted defendants from 2019.

• 2020 saw the highest average sentence imposed in human trafficking cases since the enactment of the TVPA. On average, federal courts sentenced defendants convicted in human trafficking cases to 13 years in prison.

The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report’s findings are not a prevalence estimate of trafficking in the United States, but instead serve as an objective summary of how the federal system holds traffickers accountable for their exploitative conduct. The report does not capture data from state prosecutions, state civil suits, or human trafficking cases that are not prosecuted.

A team of seven attorneys and eight law school students reviewed every human trafficking case in the federal court system in 2020. Court documents, press releases, and news sources were reviewed, and prosecutors across the country were consulted, to gather a comprehensive set of data that includes: type of trafficking case, profile of the trafficker, details about the trafficking scheme, age of the victim, and district where the case took place, among others. The complete report can be downloaded at www.traffickinginstitute.org.



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