PolicyWise for Children & Families is continuing to celebrate 20 years of impacting meaningful change. As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we are sharing stories about our successful projects, both past and present.
Creating a More Complete Picture of Human Trafficking in Alberta
Frontline service providers, police, and Survivors have stated those experiencing human trafficking may never appear in the statistics. They feel the data misses the breadth of Victims’ and Survivors’ experiences.
Human trafficking, including labour trafficking and sex trafficking, is a crime and a human rights violation. The most used and widely available data on human trafficking in Canada comes from Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada’s report, Trafficking in Persons in Canada, 2020, states that 515 police-reported human trafficking incidents occurred in Canada in 2020. Yet, the scale of human trafficking is much larger.
The Provincial Human Trafficking Network, a collaboration of more than 30 organizations working in human trafficking, wanted to see if they could work together to better describe what human trafficking looks like in Alberta.
In 2021, the facilitative organization #NotInMyCity was awarded a grant from Alberta Community and Social Services to help address this challenge on behalf of the Network through the Alberta Human Trafficking Data Portal project.
The project aims to create a more complete picture of the scale, experience, and nature of human trafficking in Alberta by bringing data together in a secure and usable way. We worked alongside #NotInMyCity to support the project by creating:
- A prototype that gathers data on human trafficking from law enforcement and community services.
- A roadmap to support improving data collection, management, sharing, integration, and analytics in the human trafficking sector.
Ultimately, the data work on this project will contribute to preventing human trafficking, protecting and supporting Victims, and prosecuting offenders.
This project was sponsored by the Buckspring Foundation.
To learn more about how PolicyWise is making an impact and to read similar stories, check out our 2022-2023 Annual Report.
