The 2024 Trafficking in Persons report is a comprehensive, objective assessment of the state of anti-trafficking efforts across 188 countries and territories, including the United States, explained Secretary of State Antony Blinken. For more than two decades, this report has documented emerging trends, highlighted areas of progress and setback and identified effective initiatives combating human trafficking.
While trafficking is as old as humanity itself, perpetrators continue to evolve their methods. Indeed, the 2024 report examines in depth the growing role of digital technology in trafficking, said Secretary Blinken:
“Around the world, trafficking networks target and recruit victims online, through social media, through dating apps, through gaming platforms. Perpetrators conduct financial transactions in opaque cryptocurrencies. They use encryption to make it harder to detect their activities or ascertain the countries where they're operating. And increasingly, traffickers coerce their victims into participating in online scams.”
Social media can reinforce stereotypes about who can be a victim of trafficking, including along lines of gender, race, ethnicity and class, cautioned Secretary Blinken:
“Like the false but widely held notion that trafficking only affects women and girls. These misconceptions limit the ability of communities, of authorities, and even victims themselves to recognize abuse as it's happening at the same time.”
At the same time, this year's report shows how some of these same technologies can be deployed to uncover and disrupt trafficking, and better hold perpetrators accountable, said Secretary Blinken:
“Civil society and the private sector collaborated to create and apply AI enabled tools that detect trafficking operations. ... A coalition of leading tech companies and anti-trafficking NGOs is developing machine learning initiatives that address emerging trafficking trends and tactics. This allows advocates and governments to identify and share new vulnerabilities, as well as to more effectively track down and prosecute trafficking schemes.”
Civil society groups are rolling out mobile apps to provide vulnerable individuals and groups with information about their rights, as well as wages, and the labor conditions offered by potential employers. Other digital tools empower workers to document and report trafficking.
“Trafficking is the very definition of a problem that no one nation can solve alone,” stated Secretary Blinken. “More than ever, we have to work not only with governments, but along with the private sector, civil society, multinational organizations, citizens and survivors who understand the complex challenge and how we can confront it.”
