Our managing director Philippa Southwell appeared on Turkish news channel TRT to talk about the UNODC Global report on trafficking in persons. She discussed the need for earlier victim identification as well as the need for a specialist training on identification amongst lawyers, law enforcement and medical practitioner alongside Sunny Slaughter and Anxhela Bruci.
According to the UNDOC report, the number of victims detected fell by 11% in 2020 compared to 2019, while the number of convictions for trafficking offences also fell by 27% over the same period – with sharper decrease registered in South Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. The pandemic would be the cause of this apparent decrease: it reduced opportunities for traffickers to operate, while it has weakened law enforcement’s capacity to detect victims. Due to restrictions and closing of public places, certain forms of trafficking such as sexual exploitation were pushed into more concealed and less safe locations, making it harder to identify victims.
The report also shows that 41% of the identified victims of trafficking are “self-rescued”, meaning that they escaped traffickers and report to the authorities on their own initiative. In comparison, 28% of victims were located by law enforcement, and 11% by members of the community and civil society. In other terms, a vast majority of trafficking victims may be undetected, either because they do not identify themselves as victims, or they are too afraid to attempt an escape at all.
The 2022 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons is the seventh of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
You can find the UNDOC report here: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2022/GLOTiP_2022_web.pdf.
You can re-watch The NewsMaker show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDRNvPTeqs.
