European Commission, Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs Directorate D, Law Enforcement and Security

Unit D5 - Organised Crime and Drugs Policy

Éva Dimovné Keresztes

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HOME-NOTIFICATIONS-D5@ec.europa.eu

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30/01/2025

30/01/2025

30/01/2025

This indicator presents data from the European Commission Study on the economic, social and human costs of trafficking in human beings within the EU.

It shows the estimated costs of trafficking in human beings in the EU, based on the number of victims registered with the authorities in EU Member States in 2016.

The indicator presents data for the following types of costs (in Euros): coordination and prevention; law enforcement; specialised victim services; health and social protection; lost economic output; and lost quality of life.

Costs are calculated for the entire EU (including the EU-27, and the EU-28).

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Trafficking in human beings: Directive 2011/36/EU (the Anti-Trafficking Directive) includes three constitutive elements of this crime: acts, means and purpose.

• The act is linked to the establishment of control over a person; it consists in the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or reception of persons, including the exchange or transfer of control over them.
• The means are the way in which control is attained: the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person.
• The purpose is the exploitation of the trafficked person.

The indicator presents data for the following types of costs:

• Coordination and prevention: Agencies at EU and authorities at Member State levels coordinate services and policies to help victims, prosecute traffickers and build the knowledge base to intervene in the processes generating trafficking in order to prevent it.
• Law enforcement: This includes the criminal justice system (police, prosecution, courts, prisons), civil legal system (regulating environments prone to trafficking), coordination by EU agencies.
• Specialised victim services: Victims of trafficking are legally entitled to specialised services. These include accommodation, medical and psychological assistance, legal assistance, education, training, job placement, reintegration assistance, return assistance.
• Health and social protection: Health includes the full range of services, since there are different ways in which the health of the victim is damaged, with long term as well as immediate need for assistance. Welfare, or social protection, includes the benefits to support someone who is unable to be fully employed, including by reason of sickness or disability.
• Lost economic output: The loss of employment in the legal economy, either fully or partially, with the consequence of lost wages, profits and taxes.
• Lost quality of life: The public’s willingness to pay to avoid pain and suffering is routinely included in governmental cost-benefit analysis even though it is ‘intangible’. This is calculated as lost years of life adjusted for quality of health.

Data is presented per million Euros.

Costs are calculated for the entire EU (including the EU-27, and the EU-28).

The findings are for the EU, not Member States.

Information is provided for both the EU-28 and EU-27. The United Kingdom left the European Union on 31 January 2020. The reference period for this study is 2016, while the UK was a Member State. The study therefore includes information on the United Kingdom.

The Study is centred on 2016. Where, occasionally, information was unavailable for 2016 and data from other years was used, this is indicated in the report. The year 2016 is the most recent one for which data on registered victims of trafficking is provided by the European Commission (2018) Data Report.

There are no adjustments regarding the number of victims in different years, since European Commission (2018) found that there were no discernible trends.

The estimates concern the victims that registered with the authorities in one year

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This Study is a key Commission action to build a sound knowledge base for the 2017 Commission Communication “Reporting on the follow up to the EU Strategy towards the eradication of trafficking in human beings and identifying further concrete actions” and the EU Anti-trafficking Directive.

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Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

No administrative information such as names or addresses that would allow direct identification, is published. Anonymity is preserved in the aggregate data.

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The study is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the website of the publications Office of the European Union.

No regular news release.

The study is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the website of the publications Office of the European Union.

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The methodology used to calculate the figures presented in this indicator are described in the report ‘Study on the economic, social and human costs of trafficking in human beings within the EU’, published in 2020.

Information on all aspects of data quality are accessible in the report ‘Study on the economic, social and human costs of trafficking in human beings within the EU’, published in 2020.

Values can be subject to uncertainty, in particular due to sampling error. This can result from the countries providing information not being typical of all eligible countries, or because a survey sample does not represent the population its drawn from.

Uncertainty can also result from problems with validity and reliability. For example, whether it is valid to extrapolate associations with violence experienced by people in the general population to the associations with violence experienced by victims of trafficking.

During the costing process decisions have to be made over which values to use and which approaches to apply. Each decision was reviewed and the approach selected was the one considered most appropriate (often the most conservative). Had a different approach been taken, final cost estimates would have also differed.

No formal quality assessment has been run. However, overall, European Commission studies exhibit high-quality standards.

Trafficking in human beings is a particularly serious crime driven by profit and involving a network of actors, both knowingly and unknowingly complicit. It generates substantial profits for perpetrators who exploit people's vulnerabilities and the demand for services provided by victims. This crime inflicts long-term harm on its victims and negatively impacts our societies and economies. It is a violation of fundamental rights, causing immense social, economic, and human costs. Trafficking strains public services, diverts resources from the legal economy, and adversely affects the quality of life, representing a significant burden on the broader economy and society.

Measuring the cost of trafficking in human beings in a monetary form is done in order to improve the quality of decision-making where cost-benefit analysis is relevant to decisions over the allocation of public resources. Translating trafficking in human beings into a cost is relevant to public policy concerning developing the European area of freedom, security and justice, and the Single European Market.

No user satisfaction surveys are carried out.

The data refers to the 27 Member States in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

The report is anchored on the number of registered victims of trafficking in 2016. This number is an underestimate of the total number of victims of trafficking.

Where there was a choice between equivalent approaches, the decision was generally made to cost conservatively. Where data were deemed uncertain in terms of their validity or how representative they were, the decision was generally made to exclude.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to estimates. Uncertainty can arise from measurement error, biases, modelling and extrapolation. Confidence intervals are provided for those estimates for which they are appropriate. These are reported in the Appendices of the report.

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The data refers to the year 2016. The report presenting the data was published in 2020.

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Data is presented for the EU level, rather than the Member State level. Therefore, comparability across Member States is not a concern for this dataset. The approach taken to calculate the data for the EU-27 and the EU-28 is comparable.

The year 2016 is the most recent one for which data on registered victims of trafficking is provided by the European Commission (2018) Data Report. There are no adjustments regarding the number of victims in different years, since European Commission (2018) found that there were no discernible trends.

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The indicator is based on the report ‘Study on the economic, social and human costs of trafficking in human beings within the EU’, published in 2020.

To measure the costs of trafficking, the report uses several sources of data: administrative statistics on registered victims of trafficking in human beings in Member States; published scientific literature; original analysis of quantitative data sets; original collection of information across the EU; Eurostat held information; European Commission documents; and other scientific studies.

Non-recurrent.

The data strategy for costing trafficking (and other matters) can be divided into two kinds: top down and bottom up.

• The top down seeks the total cost of the resource being utilised and the proportion of that cost that is used up by trafficking.
• The bottom up follows the journey of the victim (or trafficker) and seeks to identify the resources used, then seeks the unit cost of the resources, then aggregates them.

Both strategies have challenging data requirements in the field of trafficking in human beings. The study investigates the subject from both directions: top down and bottom up. The decision to use one rather than the other depends on the assessment of the quality of the data after it had been obtained.

In Appendices Section 2.7 of the study, a series of sensitivity analyses are presented which investigate the impact of particular design choices on costs.

They show that while there is a lot of uncertainty, most choices made were conservative. Mostly, the impact of having made a different (also defensible) decision would have been to increase the estimated costs.

Approaches that would have meant an increase in costs include: assuming that all trafficking victims experience threat or coercion; that victims experienced physical injuries more than once; using higher disability weights; using an estimate of the number of trafficking victims that included the unregistered; applying a child multiplier more often or a higher child multiplier; including costs for more than one year; and applying inflation.

See section 12.1 on quality assurance.

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