Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is the offense of recruiting, transporting, harboring, or receiving a person through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of exploitation, most commonly forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation, an offense against the person's liberty and dignity that is legally distinguished from human smuggling, which involves the consensual, if unlawful, facilitated movement of a person across a border with no ongoing exploitation once the movement is complete. International law, most notably the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons adopted in 2000, established a widely adopted framework defining the offense around three elements, an act such as recruitment or transport, a means such as force, fraud, or coercion, and a purpose of exploitation, a framework most national trafficking statutes have since incorporated, with an important exception that any such act involving a child for exploitation is treated as trafficking regardless of whether force or deception was used. Trafficking for labor exploitation, including in agriculture, domestic work, and manufacturing, and trafficking for sexual exploitation are the two most extensively documented forms, and both are studied as offenses that frequently intersect with organized crime networks, corrupt facilitation, and the deliberate exploitation of victims' economic vulnerability or irregular immigration status. Human trafficking investigation and victim identification present distinctive challenges compared with most other offenses, since victims are frequently isolated, coerced into silence, or, particularly where immigration status is involved, fearful of engaging with law enforcement at all, which has driven the development of specialized victim-centered investigative and support protocols distinct from ordinary criminal investigation practice.