Attachments
Counter-Trafficking Work
IOM has been working to counter trafficking in persons since 1994. In this time, we have assisted over 90,000 trafficked persons. Ensuring freedom and a chance at a new life, IOM’s assistance can include accommodation in places of safety, medical and psychosocial support, skills development and vocational training, reintegration assistance, and the options of voluntary, safe and dignified return to countries of origin, integration in the country of destination, or resettlement to third countries when needed.
Victim of Trafficking Data
IOM’s counter-trafficking programme provides a unique source of data on trafficking that is international in scope, through the collection of information obtained directly from victims of trafficking who have been assisted by IOM. For more than a decade, IOM has developed and maintained a central countertrafficking case management tool for this data, the IOM Global Human Trafficking Database, which is the largest global database with primary data on victims of trafficking.
Number of Victims of Trafficking Assisted Per Year
Nearly 50,000 victims of trafficking were recorded in IOM’s case management system, MiMOSA, in the past 10 years. However, some graphs present data from the period 2014 to 2016, where the data are most current. Only graphs showing change over time use data from 2006-2016.
Considerations
• Data are from identified victims of human trafficking who have been assisted under IOM programs and projects, and are not necessarily representative of global prevalence. It is thought that the numbers of victims identified each year globally represent less than one per cent of the total number of victims of modern-day slavery. There are countless millions who are never identified.
• The strength of IOM’s case data is that it is collected through direct assistance to individual cases.
Disaggregated data are collected for each individual case on factors such as sex, age, type of trafficking, sector of work for victims of trafficking for forced labour and the means traffickers use to control their victims. This makes IOM’s data uniquely useful for analysis. For more information on the dataset, please contact hcook@iom.int.