By Stacey Cutbush, Leanne McCallum Desselle, Melissia Larson, Brianna D’Arcangelo

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in efforts to combat human trafficking. This rush has led to disparate approaches when developing programs and providing service, creating a fragmented landscape in which service providers have varying levels of preparedness and capacity. Subsequently, the services rendered to survivors of human trafficking are varied and uneven. To remedy this, there is a pressing need for a landscape analysis of existing standards in the field to inform the creation and adoption of unified standards of care (SOCs), ensuring a cohesive, consistent, and robust service response to survivors of human trafficking.

In recent years, there has been a growing demand from practitioners, evaluators, and researchers for unified SOCs in the anti-trafficking field. These stakeholders have expressed a need to establish principles, guidelines, or frameworks for service delivery to support their efforts. Establishing a cohesive, consistent, and robust framework that can be utilized across the field will benefit anti-trafficking efforts. Building on this momentum, the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) and the Office of Trafficking in Persons (OTIP) have issued a call to action to develop unified SOCs for human trafficking service providers. As part of this multi-phase initiative, Freedom Network USA received a competitive award to the lead the development of SOCs and will convene an SOCs Technical Working Group (SOC TWG) to identify, adopt, adapt, and/or develop SOCs for human trafficking service providers.

RTI’s purpose in this project is to conduct a literature review by reviewing and synthesizing all existing literature related to human trafficking SOCs. This literature review will provide the SOC TWG with a foundational understanding of the current state of the field. Additionally, the insights derived from the literature review will guide the process and criteria for the TWG’S identification, adoption, adaptation, and/or development of SOCs in response to OVC-OTIP’s call to action. 

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI, 2023. 20p.