Findings from the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline

Abstract

Human trafficking is a public health crisis in the United States, yet it is difficult to understand national patterns and trends as official law enforcement data often suffer from reporting and identification issues. The purpose of this study is to describe temporal, case, and geographic patterns in human trafficking help-seeking in the United States. We analyzed data collected from individuals who contacted the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline from January 1, 2012 to July 31, 2018. Human trafficking cases identified by the hotline increased by 165.5% during the study period. Sex trafficking cases were more prevalent than labor trafficking cases, though labor trafficking cases on average involved more victims. Among cases in crisis, the most common request was for emergency shelter. Most calls to the hotline came from relatively few high-risk counties. This study highlights how help-seeking for human trafficking in U.S. is an important dimension that sheds light on victims’ needs and service demands.

KEYWORDS:

• human trafficking
• help-seeking
• victimization

Notes

¹ Human trafficking refers to the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain commercial sex act or labor, or any commercial sex involving a minor.

² Preliminary analyses explored the ranking of U.S. counties by rates of human trafficking (standardized by population), but the results were misleading. Of the top 20 counties in 2012, for example, 19 had only 1 or 2 cases of human trafficking. These were very low population counties. The rankings by rate are more a reflection of low population size than necessarily an indication of a human trafficking reports in the region. Therefore, we report the total number of human trafficking cases per year in each county.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Center for Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis at George Mason University and the Department of Homeland Security (2017-ST061-CINA01).  The authors would like to thank the Polaris Project for its assistance in sharing its data and reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript.