SIREN Investigative & Research Tools

1. Vulnerability targeting and improving trafficking prevention programs - Qualitative and quantitative field methods to identify the strongest risk factors in a selected locality, with enough specificity to inform trafficking prevention design.

2. Tracing broker and trafficker operations - Community-based tracing of the relationships between transporters, traffickers, brokers, agents, and end-point exploiters, with results targeted to informing local law enforcement and other authorities. See SIREN Reports TH-01 and CB-03 for examples of work on broker/trafficker operations between Myanmar-Thailand and Cambodia-Thailand-Malaysia.

2009 SIREN investigations will continue to focus on these operations, as well as examine how trafficker operations may be shifting in response to the global financial crisis, retrenchment of workers, and migrant worker push-back across borders.

3. Documenting human bondage and debt bondage - Through interviews with trafficked persons, victim service providers, and local authorities, this approach brings life and nuance to the trap of debt bondage that keeps so many exploited people under the control of their exploiters, even without physical chains. In-progress SIREN research will shed light on debt bondage and its psychosocial effects in 2009, with a focus on trafficking into the sex trade and into domestic servitude.

4. Investigating barriers to protection and safe, legal migration - National laws in every GMS country, whether criminal, labour, or civil laws, provide protection for trafficked and exploited persons within their borders, and safer migration channels. However, the vast majority of migrants migrate through informal channels, and are at risk of ending up in prisons or immigration detention centers, deported, and exploited.

Why? What added value and protections do formal, legal migration channels offer to prospective migrants, and what prevents prospective migrants from accessing these legal channels? This SIREN approach takes investigators into the middle of exploitation hotspots and on hotspot border crossing points to see how national laws are actually implemented in practice to protect trafficking victims and vulnerable migrants – by police, labor officials, immigration officials, and others.

UNIAP’s COMMIT-sponsored research on Cambodians deported from Thailand is an example of this, and similar sentinel surveillance systems are now being developed by UNIAP in strategic locations throughout the Mekong region.

5. Recruitment agency research seeks to gain a holistic understanding of labour migration through formal channels and generate more protective, sustainable, comprehensive and formal recruitment and labour migration systems, which will, in-turn, reduce the incidence of trafficking for those who use recruitment agencies.

In mid-2010 UNIAP will publish a report examining recruitment agencies in Cambodia and Malaysia, which was developed from field visits to recruitment agency training facilities and interviews with the Cambodian Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training, several non-government agencies, the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies (ACRA), a number of Cambodian recruitment agencies and 120 migrant workers who used recruitment agencies to obtain work overseas.

6.Human trafficking sentinel surveillance seeks to understand and track magnitude, severity, trends, and changes in human trafficking patterns and flows, both internal and cross-border. Established in key hotspot and border localities, sentinel surveillance uses interviews with random samples of victims and migrants to examine broker-trafficker networks; to document tricks of traffickers, including financial transactions, debts, and deception; and to collect useful metrics such as numbers of trafficking victims using particular migration routes, numbers of trafficked persons and numbers of trafficked persons mis-identified as illegal migrants and deported.

Indicators are also collected on the impact of the global economic crisis on employment, exploitative working conditions and job brokering, unsafe migration, remittances, family welfare, school drop-out, and child labour. The lessons learned and applicability of data from sentinel surveillance are numerous, offering insights on hotspot source and destination areas, locality-specific vulnerability factors, and ways to improve the targeting and effectiveness of trafficking prevention, prosecution, and protection interventions. As the programme evolves, results may include the development of more accurate estimates on the extent of human trafficking, its evolution, and the impact of factors ranging from counter-trafficking interventions in different locations, to livelihood changes in source area and the impact of events such as the global economic crisis.