The number of people transported around the world illegally and against their will has mushroomed over the last two decades. The US State Department estimates that 12.3 million adults and children were in forced, bonded labor or forced prostitution in 2010. Surprisingly, there is little extant systematic cross-national research exploring the causes of human trafficking and governments’ efforts to combat it.
The Human Trafficking Indicators project (HTI) codes information about human trafficking flows between 179 countries (and within them) from 2000 to 2011. These data are available to download now. They capture the various types of human trafficking found within a country as well as what its government is doing to prosecute traffickers, protect victims, and prevent further trafficking. HTI also codes whether states are primarily source, transit, or destination countries as well as if there is internal trafficking.
Announcements
The latest version of the HTI (version 2013) data is now available from the HTI’s Dataverse. A background data paper is also available at SSRN.
