Legal and Ethical Issues in Data Collection on Trafficking in Persons
Discussions about human trafficking data sometimes seem surprisingly abstract, as if research is most centrally about counting things from some distance: approximating “head counts” of global prevalence, formulating statistics, calculating metrics or constructing maps to illustrate geographic “hot-spots”, “routes” or “hubs”. All of these exercises, done well, can play a role in contributing to our understanding of human trafficking. But, even at their best, they are only a partial path to improved understanding and, moreover, sometimes seem to obscure the fact that human trafficking is, first and foremost, about human beings.
