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Author: Kreyling, S.J.

Title: Technology and Research Requirements for Combating Human Trafficking: Enhancing Communication, Analysis, Reporting, and Information Sharing

Summary: The U.S. Department of Energy’s Science & Technology Directorate directed PNNL to conduct an exploratory study on the domain of human trafficking in the Pacific Northwest in order to examine and identify technology and research requirements for enhancing communication, analysis, reporting, and information sharing – activities that directly support efforts to track, identify, deter, and prosecute human trafficking – including identification of potential national threats from smuggling and trafficking networks. This effort was conducted under the Knowledge Management Technologies Portfolio as part of the Integrated Federal, State, and Local/Regional Information Sharing (RISC) and Collaboration Program. The major recommendations of this report are: • Defensible methodologies are needed to estimate the number of victims of human trafficking, both nationally and regionally. Various modeling and expert elicitation techniques can be applied, using the members of each DOJ anti-trafficking task force as the pool of experts, including victim service providers. Separately, there is a need to harmonize and standardize the existing efforts to estimate the scale of human trafficking in the US. • Variations in the definitions of human trafficking employed by law enforcement, service providers, and others pose a significant challenge to accurate measurement. Develop and implement a methodology that helps practitioners clarify and describe their conceptual frameworks/mental models. • Further identification of information-sharing processes and technologies currently in use by both DHS component agencies and partner organizations that participate in each of the federally-funded Anti-Human-Trafficking Task Forces across the county is required. • Research is needed on the applicability of collecting victim data from a wide variety of sources beyond law enforcement, the outreach strategies necessary to increase the breadth of sources from which information is collected, the reduction of the methodological challenges as more data is collected from different sources, and methods for using this data for the regional examination of patterns and trends. • The information collected about human trafficking investigations by local, regional and federal law enforcement is not easily accessible by investigating agents and data is not efficiently compared between agencies or across systems. Identify an emerging industry standard for federated search and begin to move existing and new systems to support it. • Ad-hoc information sharing between investigating officers/agents in different agencies is difficult and not a routine occurrence. Given the difficulties of browsing and searching the systems of other agencies, research is needed into tools that can be accessed and edited by any vetted law enforcement officer, yet with fixed geographic and categorical sections to focus on their specific interests (human trafficking, Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC), gangs, narcotics, etc.). • Despite significantly increased attention to human trafficking, Washington State has not seen an increase in identifiable and prosecutable human trafficking-related cases associated with forced labor and domestic servitude of foreign nationals. An analysis based on analyzing visa applications (e.g., B1, H2A, H2B) should be conducted to produce a “proactive triage” of potential victims from high-risk populations. • Despite significantly increased attention to human trafficking nationwide, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not seen a comparable increase human trafficking related criminal convictions - only 30% of human trafficking cases that ICE initiated in FY09 eventually led to a criminal conviction. A lessons-learned study should be conducted to identify the factors that are most influential to a case’s successful transition from investigation to a conviction. • An International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Working Group should be convened that builds on IACP’s pre-existing work related to combating human trafficking with a specific focus on the application of technology for training and investigations from the user perspective. Lessons learned, best practices and tools or technologies needed by local law enforcement will be the expected knowledge-product outcomes. • There is large body of knowledge and perspective on trafficking and smuggling residing in the Intelligence Community (IC) which is not widely available within law enforcement. Research should be conducted on lessons learned from the intelligence community concerning human trafficking and related networks (terrorism, smuggling, narcotics, weapons, etc.) which can then be applied to law enforcement and presented in an unclassified report. • There is no systematic means of proactively assessing the scale, movement, demand, inter-connectedness, or general operation of juvenile prostitution and Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) at a regional or larger level. A pilot sensor platform should be built to examine a significant subset of on-line prostitution sites in a regional set of participating urban areas, as well as, street-based prostitution associated with DMST. • The greatest and most immediate need that the Co-Chairs of WashACT (Seattle Police, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington, ICE, and the Washington Anti-trafficking Response Network) identified was for more shelters with specialized services for victims. In order to successfully investigate and prosecute traffickers, victims must be stable and free from fear and intimidation to be effective witnesses. • There is also a lack of capacity to deal with large numbers of trafficking victims at once, should the need arise (i.e., there is no “surge capacity”).

Details: Richland, WA: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 2011. 39p.

Source: Internet Resource: PNNL-20258: Accessed December 1, 2012 at: http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-20258.pdf

Year: 2011

Country: United States

URL: http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-20258.pdf

Shelf Number: 127088

Keywords:
Human Sexual Exploitation
Human Smuggling
Human Trafficking (Washington State, U.S.)
Information Sharing
Inter-Agency Collaboration
Technology