The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act was passed by Congress in 200053 and reauthorized in 2003,54 2005, 55 and 200856. In response to the limited research and varying estimates of human trafficking, Congress requested a study on the scope and characteristics of human trafficking in the U.S. in the 2005 reauthorization57. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, implemented a system to collect information from law enforcement agencies across the U.S. about human trafficking investigations. The Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS) was designed to collect detailed information on human trafficking incidents investigated by federally funded task forces. The HTRS is the first system to specifically focus on state and local human trafficking investigations in the U.S., and has the potential to address gaps in our understanding of these crimes. A 2009 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics described the scope and characteristics of suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by the task forces in 2007 and 200858. While these findings provide some understanding of the cases investigated in task force jurisdictions in the U.S., they did not result in an estimate of the overall scope of human trafficking in the country. Additional analyses were conducted with HTRS to gain a better understanding of the data quality and reliability, and the outcomes of cases confirmed and not confirmed to be human trafficking. Recognizing the limitations of the system and maximizing its utility by integrating it with other systems may provide a more comprehensive picture of the scope of human trafficking in this country.

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