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Capturing Human Trafficking Victimization Through Crime Reporting, United States, 2013-2016

Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

Despite public attention to the problem of human trafficking, it has proven difficult to measure the problem. Improving the quality of information about human trafficking is critical to developing sound anti-trafficking policy. In support of this effort, in 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation incorporated human trafficking offenses in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Despite this achievement, there are many reasons to expect the UCR program to underreport human trafficking. Law enforcement agencies struggle to identify human trafficking and distinguishing it from other crimes. Additionally, human trafficking investigations may not be accurately classified in official data sources. Finally, human trafficking presents unique challenges to summary and incident-based crime reporting methods. For these reasons, it is important to understand how agencies identify and report human trafficking cases within the UCR program and what part of the population of human trafficking victims in a community are represented by UCR data. This study provides critical information to improve law enforcement identification and reporting of human trafficking. Coding criminal incidents investigated as human trafficking offenses in three US cities, supplemented by interviews with law and social service stakeholders in these locations, this study answers the following research questions: How are human trafficking cases identified and reported by the police? What sources of information about human trafficking exist outside of law enforcement data? What is the estimated disparity between actual instances of human trafficking and the number of human trafficking offenses reported to the UCR?

Access & Use Information

Restricted: This dataset can only be accessed or used under certain conditions. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 4245
Data First Published 2021-08-16T13:00:46
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2021-08-16T13:10:12
Rights These data are restricted due to the increased risk of violation of confidentiality of respondent and subject data.
Public Access Level restricted public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id bd0124a4-8c4c-4198-9fd8-23a38de91be4
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash ed8077a53fd08e742a325e59b6777b1271f77569ec547ab5171d5f879900bb9c
Source Schema Version 1.1

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