SIREN: Strategic Information Response Network

UNIAP’s 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 anti-human trafficking sector in a variety of different forms, including briefing reports, analytical field reports, case studies, maps, data sheets, and expert consultations and discussion forums.

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 anti-human trafficking response is moving…and where it should be moving.

SIREN Sentinel Surveillance

Human trafficking sentinel surveillance seeks to understand and track the prevalence, 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 randomised samples of victims and migrants to:

Examine broker-trafficker networks;
Document tricks of traffickers, including financial transactions, debts, and deception; and
Collect useful metrics such as numbers of trafficking victims within a migration route, numbers of trafficked persons, and numbers of trafficked persons mis-identified as illegal migrants and deported.
Indicators can also be collected over time on trends in migrant 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.

Integrated human trafficking data systems allow for regular situation assessments and better mechanisms to assess of the effectiveness of anti-trafficking interventions over time, whether collecting information on victims and their vulnerability factors, criminal networks, or the effectiveness of laws and policies. Such anti-human trafficking data systems are possible to build using multiple streams of data and intelligence from victims, migrant populations, casework, hotlines, and even official trafficking statistics. Sentinel surveillance is not necessarily the single answer to all of these needs, but it does collect information on victim, criminals, and effectiveness of laws/policies, and can track trends in exploitation, risk factors, and even prevalence.

Ultimately, speaking with and understanding the outcomes of real people affected by trafficking is the only way to understand how policies really protect victims in practice – particularly those underserved by existing programmes – and bring their perpetrators to justice.

2009-2010 UNIAP sentinel surveillance report, Poipet
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SIREN Trafficking Estimates

Despite the underground and clandestine nature of human trafficking, UNIAP believes it is not impossible to determine the magnitude of the crime. In order to properly target and scale anti-trafficking measures, as well as measure the impact of anti-trafficking interventions, it is imperative to realistically and accurately measure trafficking flows – numbers of victims, their locations, their vulnerability factors, and labour sectors with especially high prevalence of trafficked labour. As in other sectors where hidden populations are difficult to identify, it is the methodologies and resources that are key.

UNIAP’s Trafficking Estimates Initiative provided funding to innovative research partnerships, including international and local academics and NGOs, to explore innovative ways to estimate numbers of trafficked persons in various Mekong environments. The outcomes of the first of these research studies are below, and they will be openly peer reviewed and discussed regionally and nationally in early 2011.

    • A Quantitative Analysis on Human Trafficking:
      The Case of An Giang Province, Vietnam
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    • UNIAP Trafficking Estimates: A Quantitative Analysis on Human Trafficking: The Case of An Giang Province, Vietnam
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    • Estimating Labor Trafficking: A Study of Burmese Migrant Workers in Samut Sakhon, Thailand
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