NGO Reports

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Human Trafficking and Public Corruption

Corruption is an endemic feature of human trafficking. It is common to both sex and labour trafficking. Corruption enables traffickers’ often-successful efforts to evade justice. Examples abound: a police officer demands a bribe to ignore the presence of a child in a brothel; an immigration official receives payment to provide a forged passport; a judge dismisses a trafficking case in exchange for a share of the traffickers’ profits; a law enforcement official deports a trafficking victim to prevent her testimony against a criminal defendant; a government official accepts a bribe to fraudulently provide residency permits for foreign workers.

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Food & Beverage Benchmark Findings Report: How are 20 of the largest companies addressing forced labor in their supply chains?

The food and beverage industry is an at-risk sector. Forced labor occurs both in the production of raw materials and during the food processing stages of food and beverage companies’ supply chains. Food commodities are produced by agricultural workers who often come from vulnerable groups such as women, international migrants, and internal migrants with little education. Weak labor laws and law enforcement in the sector, together with isolated workplaces where housing tends to be provided by the employer, aggravate the typically poor working conditions and can leave workers vulnerable and dependent on their employer.

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MÁS QUE BEBIDAS A LA VENTA: Desvelando Las Redes de Trata Sexual en Bares Y Cantinas Estadounidenses

Miles de mujeres latinas o hispanas son prisioneras de la industria de la trata sexual en bares y establecimientos tipo cantina a lo largo de los Estados Unidos. Son reclutadas y controladas por redes criminales, propietarios de negocios o tratantes independientes. Las engañan y seducen con promesas de relaciones románticas, buenos empleos y cruce seguro por la frontera hasta los Estados Unidos. Otras mujeres y niñas se ven forzadas a vender sexo por sus padres, familiares o parejas sentimentales.

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Products of Slavery and Child Labour

Child labour is defined as work that deprives children of their childhood and the opportunity to attend school, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development. Forced labour all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the worker does not offer himself or herself voluntarily.

Anti-Slavery International is the only UK-based charity exclusively working to eliminate all forms of slavery and slavery like practices throughout the world.

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“I Was Sold”: Abuse and Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Oman

This report is based on research conducted in Oman in May 2015 by two Human Rights Watch researchers. They conducted interviews in Muscat, the Omani capital, and Seeb, a nearby coastal city, which have high concentrations of recruitment agencies and families employing domestic workers, and where many domestic workers fled after abuse by employers from other parts of Oman.

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Open-Access Registry for the Modern Slavery Act

The Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires commercial organisations operating in the UK and with an annual turnover above £36m to produce a statement setting out the steps they are taking to address and prevent the risk of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.

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2016 Global Slavery Index Report

Slavery is abhorrent, more rampant than at any time in history, and entirely avoidable. Unlike major world epidemics such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, slavery is a human condition of our own making. While that in itself is a tragedy, it also means that we have the power to end it. And end slavery we must; we cannot allow future generations to fall prey to this hideous practice.

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Assessing Government and Business Responses to the Thai Seafood Crisis

International focus on the Thai seafood industry has rapidly increased in recent years. The last two years in particular have seen a series of high profile reports that have damaged the industry’s reputation and put pressure on the Thai government. In June 2014, a six-month investigation by the Guardian newspaper culminated in an exposé linking one of Thailand’s largest companies and a number of leading American and European retailers to sh caught by slaves, which was used to feed the farmed shrimp they sold in the US and EU.

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Emerging Patterns and Trends Report #1: Youth-Produced Sexual Content

Introduces the key findings of a quantitative study of youth-produced sexual content online. The Study took place over a three month period between September and November 2014 and used a combination of proactively sourced content from search engines, historic IWF data and leads from public reports to locate “youth-produced sexual content” depicting “young people”.

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And Boys Too (ECPAT)

Discussion paper about the lack of recognition of the commercial sexual exploitation of boys in the United States, identifying challenges and recommendations.

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Laws to Combat Sex Trafficking: An Overview of International, National, Provincial and Municipal Laws and their Enforcement

This report examines current legislation, regulations and law enforcement issues relating to human trafficking for sexual exploitation at four levels: the international, national, state/provincial, and municipal. The report is part of on-going research for the Task Force on the Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada, convened by the Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF).

The overall purpose of the research is to analyze Canada’s legal framework for addressing sex trafficking, place Canada’s current legislative responses to sex trafficking at federal, provincial and municipal levels in the context of international obligations and recent developments in other countries, and to examine possible responses and innovative practices for the law and law enforcement. The report is intended to aid the Task Force in formulating its programming and policy responses to the significant problem of sexual exploitation of women and girls in Canada.

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An Assessment of Sex Trafficking in Canada

The report answers diverse inquiries posed by the Canadian Women’s Foundation following their preliminary consultations with human trafficking stakeholders from 2011 to 2012. The purpose of the report is to provide a baseline from which the Task Force can work. The report gathers information on the prevalence of human trafficking in Canada in 2013, examines the profile of victims and the techniques of traffickers, and explores newer areas in the human trafficking discussion – such as the demand to purchase sex in Canada, the role of the internet in sex trafficking, and the social and economic costs of sex trafficking. More detailed reports in other topic areas, such as relevant laws, law enforcement and service provision will follow this report over the course of the year.

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Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking of Aboriginal Women and Girls – Literature Review and Key Informant Interviews

This research was prepared for the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s National Task Force on Trafficking of Women and Girls. This research will form a comprehensive picture on the state of human trafficking for sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. The review will help to inform the work of NWAC and the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s Task Force and aid in the Task Force’s preparations to identify and suggest key solutions for a national anti- trafficking strategy effectively addressing sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.

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Report from the National Roundtable on Service Delivery for Trafficked Women and Girls in Canada

On September 18th, 2013 the Canadian Women’s Foundation brought together 46 of Canada’s leading providers of services for trafficked women and girls. THE GOAL: To identify the services and system changes that could: prevent trafficking, respond to the immediate needs of trafficked womenand girls, and help women and girls leave exploitive situations andrebuild their lives. During this full-day roundtable, representatives from women’s, Aboriginal and immigrant-serving organizations, police departments, shelters, hospitals, community organizations and anti-trafficking initiatives generated hundreds of ideas, practices and recommendations. For many participants, this was their first chance to meet with their counterparts from across Canada. It was also a unique opportunity for police and nurses, shelter workers and women’s advocates to meet together as colleagues in the trafficking sector.

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“NO MORE”: Ending Sex-Trafficking In Canada – Report of the National Task Force on Sex Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada

The Task Force was created and funded by the Canadian Women’s Foundation to investigate the nature and extent of sex trafficking in Canada, and to recommend a national anti-trafficking strategy to inform the work of the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

The findings and recommendations contained in this report were developed to assist the Canadian Women’s Foundation in creating its own five-year national anti-trafficking strategy. It is also hoped the recommendations will inform and offer guidance to other stakeholders working in this area.

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FROM HEARTBREAKING TO GROUNDBREAKING: Stories and Strategies to End Sex Trafficking in Canada

Girls, often as young as 13, are being lured, recruited and procured into sexual slavery by predators who profit from their endeavors, rob them of their dignity, and often wound them with lifelong scars, changing forever the trajectories of otherwise happy lives.

Poverty, violence and widespread gender inequity are the preconditions for trafficking, but not the only factors. Any one of the previously trafficked girls and women we have come to know could be our own daughter, our sister, our niece, our aunt. The diversity of those who are trafficked is sobering: Any girl, anywhere, at any time.

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Becoming Hope: Stories, Reflections and Recommendations about Trafficking and Slavery Aftercare in the UK

Presents the stories of Kate, Amy and Natalie (not their real names). These survivors approached SHF for long-term aftercare support; in one way or another they had been let down by the system, and they wanted us to tell their stories. Demonstrates the challenges they have faced, the limitations of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), and the insufficient support provided by many social and government services.

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Human Trafficking in the Cotton Industry

Examines the link between cotton and human trafficking by analyzing: the different tiers in the fashion supply chain in which trafficking occurs; media coverage of countries involved in the fashion industry across the world related to the issue; how Non-Governmental Organisations drive media awareness and influence key initiatives for change; and, the role companies have to play in establishing a traffik-free fashion industry.

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Forced Labor in the Production of Electronic Goods in Malaysia: A Comprehensive Study of Scope and Characteristics

Malaysia’s electronics sector workforce includes hundreds of thousands of foreign migrant workers who come to Malaysia on the promise of a good salary and steady work – an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families. But many are subject to high recruitment fees, personal debt, complicated recruitment processes, lack of transparency about their eventual working conditions, and inadequate legal protections. Unscrupulous behavior on the part of employers or third-party employment agents1 can exacerbate vulnerability to exploitation, but the system in which foreign workers are recruited, placed and managed is complex enough to create vulnerability even in the absence of willful intent to exploit. The conditions faced by foreign electronics workers in Malaysia have the potential to result in forced labor. In 2012, Verité received funding from the US Department of Labor to conduct a study to determine whether such forced labor does, in fact, exist in the production of electronic goods in Malaysia.

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Slavery at Sea: The Continued Plight of Trafficked Migrants in Thailand’s Fishing Industry

Provides recent examples of problems that have long plagued the industry in Thailand. Since the late 1980s, Thailand’s increasing prosperity and low unemployment rate have led many Thai citizens to turn away from low-paid work in the country’s more labour-intensive sectors, including construction, fishing and seafood processing. At the same time, Thailand’s comparatively underdeveloped neighbours have provided a cheap and plentiful supply of migrant labour, which has acted to discourage businesses from investing in labour-saving production processes.22 Consequently, entire sections of the Thai economy have become strongly reliant on migrant labour. Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia now constitute up to 10 per cent of Thailand’s workforce, and as much as 90 per cent in the seafood industry.

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Recommendations for Fighting Human Trafficking in the United States and Abroad

2008 Transition Report for the Next Presidential Administration by The Action Group to End Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery. The Action Group is comprised of: the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking, Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, Free the Slaves, International Justice Mission, Not For Sale Campaign, Polaris Project, Ricky Martin Foundation, Solidarity Center, and Vital Voices Global Partnership. The Action Group is a U.S.-based, non-partisan group of complementary organizations dedicated to abolishing modern-day slavery and human trafficking.

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