Covid-19 reduces human trafficking in two decades, now Ukraine war trigger for hike: UN

• The biggest drops were reported in low- and middle-income countries.
• The biggest decrease, of 24%, was in trafficking for sexual exploitation.
• Parts of southeast Asia, central America, and the Caribbean could see further declines in 2021.

As opportunities for trafficking and policing decreased due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of victims of human trafficking decreased for the first time in 20 years. However, the Ukraine war has likely now resulted in a fresh spike, according to a UN assessment released on Tuesday.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in its seventh Global Report on Trafficking in Persons that the number of victims who had been identified as traffickers decreased by 11% in 2020, the most recent year for which data are available in the majority of nations.

“In 2020, for the first time, the number of victims detected globally decreased,” the UNODC said in a summary of the report, adding that the biggest drops were reported in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the south and central America but also sub-Saharan Africa, east Asia, and the Pacific region.

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“This change in trends could be the result of three different factors affecting especially low- and medium-income countries during the pandemic: lower institutional capacity to detect victims, fewer opportunities for traffickers to operate due to Covid-19 preventive restrictions, and some trafficking forms moving to more hidden and less likely to be detected locations,” it said.

Parts of southeast Asia, central America, and the Caribbean could see further declines in 2021, according to preliminary data from just 20 countries, it added.

The biggest decrease, of 24%, was in trafficking for sexual exploitation. For the first time since the UNODC began compiling statistics, discovered trafficking in this category, as a percentage of the total, was approximately on par with trafficking for forced labour, at about 39% each, according to the report.

“Sexual exploitation may have reduced due to the (pandemic-related) closure of public spaces and it may have also been pushed into less visible and less safe locations, making this form of trafficking more concealed and harder to be detected,” the UNODC said.

The crisis in Ukraine is unlikely to be an exception to the rule that conflicts tend to boost trafficking, it was added.

“The refugee emergency in Ukraine is elevating risks of trafficking for the Ukrainian displaced population. The 2014 conflict in Ukraine quadrupled the number of Ukrainian victims detected in Western Europe in 2016,” it said, referring to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

In addition, it stated that in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, it anticipates an even higher number of victims of trafficking.

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