The Human Trafficking Institute recently released its 2022 Federal Human Trafficking Report, providing information and statistics on human trafficking.
Victor Boutros is CEO and co-founder of the institute, founded in 2016. It works with foreign governments to build specialized teams of police, prosecutors, and victim specialists, trains these teams, and hires former FBI agents, who help team members build their skills.
“The 2022 Federal Human Trafficking Report tracks the average length of exploitation for victims of sex trafficking and forced labor,” the institute said in a tweet. “This data is crucial for developing intervention strategies for victims and care for survivors.”
In the report, the institute highlighted a few cases of human trafficking. One was United States v. Rengel Ramirez-Manzano, who allegedly paid smugglers to bring a woman from Mexico into the United States, where she thought she would be furthering their romantic relationship. However, the victim was abused and forced to work to pay off her debt. This is unfortunately common, the report says. There were more human trafficking cases in states along the southern border than in other parts of the country, the report says.
The report also said 85% of trafficking victims were trafficked into the U.S., and 23% of foreign national victims were undocumented before being trafficked.
The report also goes into depth on how victims are trafficked and the methods traffickers use. “One noticeable change in the sex trafficking cases filed in the federal court system has been the increased use of mobile payment platforms in lieu of cash,” the report says. Venmo, PayPal and Cashapp are used fairly often in trafficking transactions, the report said, adding that this is all valuable information for trying to identify trafficking cases.
The report also touches on programs different countries use to combat trafficking, such as how Belize has started working in tandem with the institute to develop legislation and train professionals to help mitigate human trafficking there.
