Creating a Blueprint to Assess and Combat Human Trafficking in States

Across the country, state governments face the growing and complex challenge of fighting human trafficking within their jurisdiction. This may happen separately in law enforcement organizations or within organizations that provide services to victims. While collaboration among agencies is growing quickly, in order to address the complexities of human trafficking states and their counties must use a disciplined approach that assesses the scope of the problem and the specific gaps within their jurisdiction.

Agencies should systematically assess the situation in their locale to understand the complexity of human trafficking and the indicators within their own population. They can focus on their most vulnerable people and the means and methods used by traffickers to recruit, exploit, and coerce victims into their will.

State and local agencies could share knowledge, be proactive, and ask the right questions. They can start here:

• Questions on demographics: Who falls into the vulnerable population in your community? Where is the homeless population in your community? Are youth running away, and if so, why? Where are they going? Does your community have an addicted, transient, or migrant population?

• Questions on your community: Who are the lower-paying employers in your area? Do you have labor complaints or other related reports relating to certain employers in your community? Does your community have a truancy problem? Do members of your community have language barriers, physical, or mental challenges? Do you have organized crime involving gangs or drug traffickers?

• Questions on industry: Is commercial sex offered/advertised within your community? How many ads can you identify on any given day to understand the volume of supply? Do you have hotels/motels or massage parlors in your community where owners and workers might be complicit to this illicit activity?

• Questions on Human Trafficking: What means and methods are used by traffickers to identify, recruit, communicate with, transport, employ, house, isolate, and coerce (mentally) or compel (physically) victims?

The population referenced does not have a loud voice, if any voice at all and tragically may not even be noticed as actual members of a community. In some locales, community members may not want to know the answers to these questions, as they are dark and often difficult to fathom.

While it is easy to ask the questions, it takes time and resources to find the answers. In many cases, communities do not have the financial means and look to prioritize other challenges. However, if state and local law enforcement do not explore and assess the nature and degree of human trafficking in their community and find ways to address it, they will repetitively feel the negative impact through other related criminal activity.

To start this assessment process, law enforcement agencies can focus on their runaway youth, missing persons, and internet advertising for a more in-depth look into who is targeted by traffickers in their locale. There are other resources to reach out to across disciplines, too. Federal actors, non-profits, private consulting and technology firms, medical service providers, and more can all help navigate the problem and provide different perspectives. Resources such as the Polaris Project, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, local fusion centers, or consulting firms with experience in human trafficking assessments and data analytics can provide better insight.

So much of this data is currently available from Federal, state, local, private, and nonprofit organizations. But Federal and State levels are not always harnessing this information to understand the trends and challenges that a state or jurisdiction faces. This is a critical area of exploration in an assessment. After a state completes an assessment and understands their current capabilities and gaps in these capabilities, they can pursue creating a Human Trafficking Strategy,  consider evolving task forces or creating new functions, and enhancing collaboration with community partners operating in the same mission space.

Creating a blueprint that brings together community indicators and stakeholders with unique perspectives, combined with a practical and unified approach, can help state governments effectively combat or even prevent the effect of human trafficking in their communities – while using the limited resources they have effectively.