How is human trafficking data accessible to the public and researchers?  (updating)

Author: Gewei Cao 

1. Introduction

Human trafficking can be regarded as one of the entering steps of modern slavery; it is the modern version of the slave trade. For researchers and the public who are interested in this topic, data accessibility is crucial. However, different countries have different data release standards, which makes it annoying to acquire and understand the patterns of human trafficking in these countries. This blog will share my human trafficking data searching experience and results when I worked on my PhD project: Mistrust and Modern Slavery. 

The key challenge for data-driven human trafficking research is what I call "dilemma of data", i.e., for countries with good human trafficking data release, usually their domestic institution and law enforcement are strong enough to manage human trafficking; on the contrary, for countries facing serieous human trafficking challenges, their domestic police authorities are usually bad at managing and reporting such crime. This is a mismatch between human trafficking data supply and research demands, because the countries that provide low-quality human trafficking data need more attention to help them manage this issue, but their data availability prevents researchers from entering and publishing. Meanwhile, most available data are at the national level, but such data lacks of variation required for academic research (e.g., Germany has not bad human trafficking data accessibility, but it only has 16 states, quite low variation for statistical analysis). Therefore, it is worth sharing and discussing my experiences working with such data. 

In the following contents, I will first evaluate the human trafficking issues in each country and their data accessibility. Then I will describe what I found during my research on my project, Mistrust and Modern Slavery. Next, I will discuss some unsuccessful data searching experiences. If readers of this blog know some better data sources, please contact me and share your experience. Finally, I will shortly summarize this blog. 

2. Overview of the human trafficking problem worldwide and governments' responses 

3. Where to find detailed human trafficking data

3.1 Romania

3.2 India

3.3 USA

4. Countries that only partially release their human trafficking data, maybe useful for your research 

5. Conclusion