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The U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime produced this report on human trafficking. The executive summary states,
"In 2007, UNODC conducted, in the framework of the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT), a study on the state of the world’s response to the crime of human trafficking. This report offers an unprecedented view of the available information on the state of the world’s response to human trafficking, including near-comprehensive data on national legislative and enforcement activity. Over the course of a few months in 2007 and 2008, UNODC gathered information concerning 155 countries and territories. With a few notable exceptions, nearly all of the larger states participated. This report summarizes this information, starting with a discussion of the global and regional figures and closing with country profiles for participating nations.
Of course, data on the response of states to human trafficking are only indirect indicators of
the nature of the underlying problem. Countries with well-resourced criminal justice agencies
may show a great deal of activity even when human trafficking is relatively rare, while countries with larger problems but less capacity may be unable to muster a proportionate response.
But the material gathered here does illustrate that, in a remarkably short time, tremendous
progress has been made in combating a crime that was only recently widely acknowledged. It
also demonstrates that sharing human trafficking data on a global basis is possible and can
yield valuable insights, despite the inherent limitations of the criminal justice figures."
