2025 Trafficking in Persons Report Summary

The 25th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) brings many anti-trafficking victories worth celebrating. Yet according to the recently released 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, significant opportunities to prevent exploitation and assist victims remain.[1]

This annual U.S. Department of State publication analyzes global human trafficking trends, highlights promising interventions, and grades government responses. As in previous years, human trafficking pervades global markets and communities, requiring evolving responses to address both historic and emergent challenges. Specifically, the report urges governments to build comprehensive systems to investigate and prosecute traffickers, to proactively identify and serve victims, and to prevent trafficking through education campaigns.

Here are key points from the 2025 report.

Global Law Enforcement Data

According to participating governments’ law enforcement data, overall human trafficking instances, prosecutions, and convictions have increased. Though 2024 had the highest ever reported victims, 2024 saw the highest ever convictions for labor trafficking.

See the report for additional regional breakdowns.

Addressing Government Complicity

THE PROBLEM: Official complicity in trafficking ranges from states failing to conduct sufficient oversight, to engaging in state-sponsored trafficking programs. While many countries have begun addressing their complicity, others have directly sponsored labor trafficking programs. For example, several countries utilize detention, forced labor, and military service to punish political opposition and/or exploit their own citizens.

THE SOLUTION:

• Pass legislation prohibiting, and adopt internal policies punishing, complicity.

• Enhance international cooperation to avoid transshipment, increase awareness of trafficking-tainted products, and coordinate actions against countries sponsoring forced labor.

• Train officials to recognize and report human trafficking.

Promising Healthcare Practices for Survivor Care

THE PROBLEM: An estimated 90 percent of trafficking survivors attend healthcare settings, yet less than half of U.S. healthcare providers receive training on trafficking identification and responses. This creates a gap in both detection and specialized care.

THE SOLUTION:

• Train healthcare workers on various types of violence, including human trafficking, in medical and nursing schools and mandatory continuing education programs.

• Comprehensively integrate trauma awareness and cultural sensitivity into institutional operations to mitigate re-traumatization and promote patient autonomy and informed care.

• Create effective support systems that connect patients with safe housing, case management services, and law enforcement, address barriers to victim self-disclosure, and join with local task forces.

Streamlining Victim Services

THE PROBLEM: Many governments lack processes and/or resources to identify victims and refer them to secure housing, legal support, and social services.

THE SOLUTION:

• Ensure identification and referral procedures between governments are multi-disciplinary and collaborative with civil society.

• Grant all trafficking victims immediate, non-conditional protection services, social benefits, and individualized support and create a referral pathway focused on protection rather than prosecution.

• Establish specialized law enforcement units, anti-trafficking trainings, and funding streams to NGOs to identify victims and provide assistance.

Forced Criminality: Involuntary Crimes

THE PROBLEM: Traffickers may force another person to engage in highly lucrative criminal conduct–such as financial fraud, scamming, and commercial sexual exploitation–while shielding themselves from criminal liability. As a result, authorities are more likely to penalize victims than traffickers, both impeding justice investigations and victim service referral.

THE SOLUTION:

• Establish protocols that address forced criminality in legal frameworks and law enforcement policies, including updating victim identification guidelines.

• Implement the non-punishment principle to protect victims, including adoption of expungement and vacatur laws to clear victims’ criminal records and prevent long-term harm.

• Ensure victim protection and create a service referral mechanism within criminal justice systems.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Trafficking

THE PROBLEM: Traffickers increasingly weaponize AI, such as creating video and photo deepfakes, automating operations to identify and recruit victims, and scaling-up grooming through chatbots and translation services. As the report states, this is a “dangerous advancement where traffickers use automated systems to help identify and trap victims at an unprecedented scale.”

THE SOLUTION:

• Strategically collaborate with technology companies, law enforcement, and trafficking experts to leverage AI technology that detects inappropriate, suspicious, and unlawful content and subsequently analyzes the data to improve prevention and intervention.

• Use AI tools to educate potential victims through targeted awareness campaigns in multiple languages and contexts.

Combatting Fishing and Seafood Processing Forced Labor

THE PROBLEM: Fishing and seafood processing employs and feeds millions of people, generating billions of dollars in annual trade. Yet, trafficking activities infiltrate markets globally. Fishing fleets, seafood companies, recruitment agencies, and complicit officials exploit migrant seafarers into forced labor through deception, wage withholding, debt-based coercion, and physical, psychological, sexual, and other abuses.

THE SOLUTION:

• Governments must prioritize seafarer victim identification and protection in national anti-trafficking action plans while pursuing complementary accountability measures, such as import restrictions, sanctions, and visa restrictions.

• Private sector stakeholders should advance survivor-informed labor standards and protection, including access to communication technology at sea, seafood supply chain mapping, routine risk assessments, and fair purchasing practices.

Forced Labor Import Prohibition

THE PROBLEM: An estimated $236 billion is generated through forced labor supply chains in major agriculture, construction, and manufacturing industries and state-imposed labor. This distorts global trade, undermines legitimate businesses, depresses wages, degrades working conditions, and violates U.S. and global trade laws.

THE SOLUTION:

• Instituting comprehensive supply chain tracing and action on human rights violations, including termination of supplier relationships.

• Expanding and implementing labor laws and sanctions to prohibit import of goods made with forced labor.

Addressing Trafficking through Survivor Advisory Boards

THE PROBLEM: Too often, governments fail to integrate one of the most effective anti-trafficking tools: survivor expertise. Without formalized efforts to engage victims through bodies such as advisory boards, human trafficking prosecution, protection, and prevention policies fall short.

THE SOLUTION:

• Establish advisory boards that integrate expert guidance, such as the S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking.

• Establish clear objectives and recommendations, with an eye toward building trust and clear communication within these partnerships.

National Government Rankings

Report rankings reflect an assessment of government laws prohibiting and punishing trafficking, victim identification measures, funding for NGO victim services, victim protection and assistance, and measures to prevent human trafficking and reduce the demand for sexual exploitation.

Tier 1 nations meet minimum U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) standards and demonstrate progress, while Tier 3 nations demonstrate no such commitment and consequently face financial penalties.

Conclusion

Human trafficking is constantly evolving. Capitalizing on instability sparked by poverty, world conflicts, or extreme weather, traffickers use technological innovations and proven methods of exploitation to prey upon society’s most vulnerable.

So after 25 years of coordinated anti-trafficking efforts, what is the way forward?

The report authors recommend building upon successful models. This includes solutions highlighted above, while more broadly emphasizing humanitarian response plans that integrate trafficking prevention, leveraging technology to expand services, court processing, and education, and instituting laws and policies that confront forced labor. Lastly, collaborative and community mobilization can improve responses and empower survivors:

“Partnerships, whether at the local, national, or international level, are critical in the fight against human trafficking. Collaboration among governments, civil society, the private sector, and survivors plays a critical role in developing and implementing sustainable programs and policies to combat trafficking.”

Organizations like Greenlight Operation and its partners have a pivotal role to play in centering victims, joining local collaborations, and ultimately transforming our communities into bastions of safety, stability, and restoration.

[1] “Trafficking in persons” and “human trafficking” refer to a crime whereby traffickers exploit and profit at the expense of adults or children by compelling them to perform labor or engage in commercial sex. When a person younger than 18 is used to perform a commercial sex act, it is a crime regardless of force, fraud, or coercion. The U.S. recognizes two primary forms: forced labor and sex trafficking. The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons contain similar definitions of human trafficking, using a three-element framework focused on the trafficker’s acts, means, and purpose. ”2025 Trafficking in Persons Report,” U.S. Department of State, 2026, https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/.