Trafficking in persons has become a cornerstone of organized crime, posing a critical threat to global security, democracy, governance and human rights. Most traffickers operate within structured criminal networks, enabling them to exploit more victims, for extended periods and with greater violence - disproportionality affecting women and children, who frequently endure the most severe forms of abuses.
Trafficking in persons and organized crime form a mutually reinforcing cycle that not only threatens global and national security, weakens governance, and undermines human rights but also erodes the rule of law, weakens democracy, and undermines sustainable development. Moreover, it perpetuates structural gender inequalities and fuels gender-based violence and discrimination.
The 2024 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons indicates that organized crime is a significant driver of trafficking in persons, accounting for 74 per cent of reported cases. Trafficking in persons increasingly intersects with other serious crimes, including cybercrime and the illicit trafficking of firearms, serving as a major revenue stream for organized crime and, in some contexts, a source of direct or indirect funding for terrorist activities. These convergences - particularly in conflict and post-conflict settings - pose a growing threat to international peace and security, underscoring the urgent need for coordinated, cross-sectoral, and transnational responses.
Women and girls continue to be the most detected victims worldwide, exploited in all forms of trafficking, but particularly for sexual purposes. Children, especially those who are unaccompanied or separated, living in institutional settings, or from marginalized communities, are increasingly targeted by traffickers due to their heightened vulnerability and a lack of protection and support services. Gaps in labour protection and enforcement, including unfair recruitment practices, further enable traffickers to operate with impunity.
Trafficking in persons occurs at local, national and regional levels. Traffickers exploit a wide range of factors, especially affecting children, such as poverty, lack of access to education, displacement, and weak social protection systems. These vulnerabilities are also compounded by systemic gender inequalities, which traffickers deliberately manipulate to target women and girls. Exploitation occurs in an increasingly complex environment shaped by rapidly evolving technologies that facilitate the recruitment, control and abuse of victims. At the same time, weak legal frameworks, fragmented policy responses, and inconsistent enforcement of rule of law create conditions in which traffickers operate.
Throughout their operations, traffickers exploit people's vulnerabilities through complex methods and with the collaboration of multiple individuals, with each member playing a specific role. The profitability of these operations, combined with their effective use of corruption, techniques to evade law enforcement, low punishment rates, lack of effective prevention interventions increase the risks of trafficking. This underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive and collaborative response involving State and local authorities, civil society, trade unions, the private sector and international organizations, and survivors of trafficking. Such a response must include targeted measures that address the specific risks faced by women and children, ensuring gender-responsive and age-sensitive prevention interventions, access to justice, protection, and support services.
Trafficking networks often depend on illicit financial markets, fraudulent practices and the infrastructure of other criminal activities, such as drugs and firearms trafficking, as well as online fraud and deception, to sustain their operations and avoid detection. This convergence has created a criminal ecosystem where various illicit activities intersect and fuel each other, and amplify the complexity of trafficking in persons, making it a critical national and transnational security threat. This requires urgent and coordinated policy and operational responses to adopt transversal crime-fighting policies and approaches that foster collaboration between law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, civil society, and all relevant stakeholders. These responses should include interventions to protect fundamental rights of individuals, including strategies that address the inequality between women and men, while addressing the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women and children, within the broader context of organized crime.
Organized criminal networks often operate along irregular routes used by both migrants and refugees profiting from limited safe and legal pathways. This exposes migrants and refugees to abuse, extortion, and exploitation. In many contexts, trafficking in persons and smuggling networks overlap, with individuals initially smuggled across borders are subsequently trafficked, especially, for forced labour, sexual exploitation, or forced criminality.
Trafficking in persons is often a consequence of organized crime's expansion and States' weak enforcement mechanisms. As criminal networks grow and become more sophisticated, they diversify into new illicit markets, incorporating trafficking in persons into their operations by leveraging existing infrastructure, such as migrant smuggling routes, money laundering channels, and corrupt networks. In this context, trafficking in persons becomes both a tactic and a byproduct of broader criminal strategies.
Criminal networks often exacerbate preexisting conditions, further enabling trafficking. It thrives in conditions of instability, in situations of armed conflict, weak rule of law, poverty, and inequality-particularly where protection systems are inadequate, and justice systems are fragile. These conditions intensify the vulnerability of individuals, especially children, to trafficking in persons. In these fragile settings, particularly where non-state armed groups and/or terrorist groups control territory, trafficking may serve both as a method of generating income and a tactic of terror, including the use of sex exploitation, forced labour, or recruitment of children in conflict zones. In areas heavily impacted by crime, people face greater risks of displacement within and across borders, unemployment, and exploitation, while fear of corruption and retaliation discourages them from seeking help from authorities.
States' strategies to address the crime of trafficking in persons must prioritize comprehensive, human rights-based and gender-and age-sensitive approach and responsiveness. These should integrate political, security, and human rights aspects; engage relevant stakeholders from diverse sectors throughout the policymaking and implementing processes; and uphold international obligations under human rights, labour and refugee law. They must also emphasize prevention, accountability, and ensure access to protection and support services for all victims-regardless of their status.
On the other hand, victims may be forced into criminal activities such as drug trafficking, theft, smuggling of migrants, terrorism offences, money laundering and cybercrime. Alarmingly, a growing number of migrant children - especially those unaccompanied or separated - are being trafficked for forced criminality, particularly drug trafficking. Evidence also shows that some women involved in trafficking in persons, particularly for sexual exploitation, are themselves victims before becoming perpetrators.
Effectively addressing trafficking in persons requires unity of purpose, clarity of commitment, shared responsibility, and a rights-based, gender-responsive and age-sensitive approach. This means coordinated efforts in prevention, investigation and prosecution, alongside victims' identification, support and protection.
The Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons reaffirms its key recommendations to the fourth appraisal of the Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons, and calls on States and relevant stakeholders to:
- Strengthen measures to prevent and respond to trafficking in persons, particularly of children, through comprehensive strategies that address underlying vulnerabilities. These strategies should take into account existing policies against organized crime, corruption, illicit financial flows, cybercrime, migrant smuggling, terrorism, decent work deficits.
- Enhance resources and action to prevent and respond to trafficking in persons in humanitarian emergencies as well as in mixed movements, while ensuring policy coherence across sectors.
- Strengthen cooperation between anti-trafficking, organized crime, and counter-terrorism actors at national, regional and international levels, ensuring that responses to trafficking in persons consider interlinkages among these offences, and operational convergence in conflict affected areas. This includes increasing cooperation and information sharing between relevant intelligence services, including financial intelligence units with countering financing of terrorism units and criminal justice actors.
- Enhance financial intelligence and investigative efforts to detect and disrupt illicit financial transactions linked to organized crime, terrorism financing and trafficking in persons. This should include stronger cooperation with and between the financial services sector and financial intelligence units to detect, trace, and act on suspicious activity. Recovered assets and proceeds of crime should be forfeited and used to, among other purposes, provide comprehensive support, protection, and compensation for victims of trafficking in persons.
- Adopt rights-based migration pathways and ensure fair recruitment and decent work for all workers, regardless of status, including fundamental rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, to address vulnerabilities that facilitate trafficking.
- Provide comprehensive support services to survivors of trafficking in persons, independently of their migration status, prioritizing their safety, recovery, and reintegration. Continuously train State and civil society personnel to proactively identify victims and ensure they have access to support services.
- Prioritize child-sensitive, rights-based responses to trafficking, including early identification, protection, and specialized support services for children.
- Promote the consistent and effective application of the non-punishment principle across law enforcement, judicial, and migration systems, recognizing that victims of trafficking in persons may be coerced into committing crimes as a result of their exploitation and should not be punished for such. Proper identification victims is essential, along with their referral to appropriate assistance and protection services, including through well-resourced National Referral Mechanisms. Child victims should be referred to child protection authorities in full compliance with the non-punishment principle and treated as victims of trafficking in persons. Child protection systems should be strengthened to respond effectively to their specific needs.
- Invest in sustained multilateral cooperation and data-driven solutions to effectively respond to trafficking in persons and its intersection with other forms of organized crime. This includes intelligence sharing and evidence-based policy development, dismantling transnational criminal networks, and strengthening prevention, protection, and prosecution efforts.
- Support coordinated action to address the heightened risks of trafficking in persons in humanitarian settings and along mixed movement routes of refugees and migrants, while upholding international refugee law, human rights and labour obligations, in addition to the protection obligations enshrined in transnational criminal law instruments.
- Strengthen the prevention of child trafficking among forcibly displaced, stateless, and migrant children by promoting access to territory, child-friendly asylum procedures, durable solutions, and safe, legal pathways, as outlined in the GCR Multistakeholder Pledge "Protection for Refugees and Migrants at Risk of or Affected by Trafficking in Persons". In parallel, adopt a route-based approach to implement the Global Compacts on Refugees and the Global Compact on Migration by addressing trafficking and related abuses along mixed movement routes. This includes enhancing prevention, risk mitigation, protection, and durable solutions for those at risk or affected; and the collection of reliable, disaggregated data-aligned with the do-no-harm principle-to understand the gendered impacts of trafficking and structural barriers to justice, especially for women and children.
- Ensure that survivors are included in the development of policies and interventions to prevent and respond to trafficking in persons.
- Strengthen intelligence sharing, cross-border cooperation and enhance judicial coordination to ensure accountability and end impunity.
- Prioritize addressing organized crime related to trafficking in persons and ensuring access to justice for migrants who fall victim to crime, as established by the Progress Declaration of 2022 International Migration Review Forum.
- Increase financial support to the dedicated Trust Funds which resource coordinated efforts in prevention, investigation and prosecution of trafficking networks as well as victim identification and support across borders (e.g. UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking (UNVTF), the Migration Multi-Partner Trust Fund, and the OAS Inter-American Voluntary Contribution Fund for the Prevention of Violence and Crime).
About the Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons
The Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons (ICAT) is a UN policy forum mandated by the General Assembly resolution 61/180 to improve coordination and cooperation among UN agencies and other relevant international organizations, and to facilitate a holistic and comprehensive approach to preventing and combating trafficking in persons, including protection and support for victims and survivors.
In 2025, ICAT is co-chaired by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which is also responsible for its continuous coordination.
