The United States Department of Justice hosted the Summit on Combating Human Trafficking on Jan. 14 in Washington, D.C. Attorneys general from across the U.S. attended the summit, along with representatives from law enforcement agencies, business communities and advocacy groups. The summit comes during National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, which was proclaimed by former President Barack Obama on Jan. 11, 2010. During this month, U.S. government agencies — local, national and regional — partner with a wide variety of groups to host summits and workshops, reflect on the work from the previous year, and announce new programs for the coming year.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, posted a story^[1] about a human trafficking case the agency helped prosecute, and included a link to the Department of Homeland Security’s Indicator Card resource^[2] — published in multiple languages — that defines human trafficking and lists several common indicators of trafficking and modern slavery.

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen talked about the important takeaways from the summit:

First, protecting and assisting victims is important to the larger cause of justice and to the immediate needs of investigation and prosecution. Second, human trafficking overlaps with other crimes, including drug trafficking, gang crimes, money laundering, and human smuggling. And human trafficking is hidden in a very wide range of settings, from local and transnational commercial sex enterprises, to sweatshops and fields across the U.S., all the way to global supply chains of major multinational corporations. We need more innovative strategies to detect it so that we can stop it. Third, we need the availability of all law enforcement tools to adequately investigate and prosecute more human trafficking cases. While some say we cannot prosecute our way out of this problem, the fact is that a human trafficker who remains at large can and will find other victims.^[3]