TO RECEIVE REGULAR UPDATES ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING NEWS AROUND THE GREATER MEKONG SUB-REGION
The Strategic Information Response Network (SIREN) delivers high quality, responsive, and up-to-date data and analysis on cutting edge issues within the human trafficking sector, primarily in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. SIREN conveys information to the human counter-trafficking sector in a variety of different forms: briefing reports, analytical field reports, case studies, maps, data sheets, and discussion forums and events, to name a few.
Research, validation, and analysis are conducted in the field, by community-based organizations, national and international agencies, and/or UNIAP itself. The goal is to bring real knowledge and context on real priority issues from the grassroots to the national and regional levels, and vice versa. SIREN’s aim is to be responsive and reliable: providing a forum for high quality information exchange and multi-source analysis in easily digestible formats, to those who require this information for effective programming, prosecution, or policy formulation. Through SIREN, UNIAP provides the forum, technical assistance, and networking and dissemination mechanisms for organizations to share what they know, to connect, and to initiate and improve action – monitoring where the counter-trafficking response is moving…and where it should be moving.
While SIREN partners use their own methods to collect data and report on critical topics (and UNIAP itself stays flexible in order to stay responsive), UNIAP’s SIREN arsenal of investigative and research tools include five core methodological approaches that are disseminated in three key ways:
SIREN investigative and 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. See SIREN Report GMS-02 for details on methods.
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 Report TH-01 for an example. Findings can also be validated through interviews with imprisoned, convicted traffickers – as in-progress SIREN research will demonstrate later in 2008.
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 later in 2008.
4.
Investigating barriers to protection - National laws in every GMS country, whether criminal, labor, or civil laws, provide for protections of trafficked and exploited persons within their borders. So why do we still find trafficking victims in prisons, immigration detention centers, deported, and exploited? This SIREN approach takes investigators into the middle of exploitation hotspots to see how national laws are actually implemented in practice to protect trafficking victims and the vulnerable – by police, labor officials, immigration officials, and others. Research is in progress, with reports due beginning in summer 2008.
5.
Investigating barriers to safe, legal migration - The vast majority of cross-border migrants do so through informal channels. 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? SIREN research investigating barriers to safe, legal migration will be rolled out beginning in 2008.
