The Blind Spot in Trafficking Prevention
“I know the risks,” they told me, “but I also know I still need money.”
A survivor of human trafficking, they had returned to Indonesia only months earlier after being exploited while working overseas. Yet they were already planning to migrate again.
Last month, as the world marked World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, I kept coming back to that conversation. It changed the way I think about trafficking prevention. Trafficking does not look the same for everyone. It can involve sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude, forced criminality, and other forms of exploitation. But behind each form is a person whose vulnerability has been exploited.
For years, prevention has rightly focused on stopping exploitation before it happens. Governments, international organizations, and civil society encourage prospective migrant workers to verify recruiters, use official migration channels, and think carefully before accepting overseas job offers. Those efforts remain essential, especially as traffickers increasingly use social media, messaging platforms, and fraudulent online advertisements to recruit victims.
But they are only part of the picture.
Trafficking has changed. Organized criminal groups have become more sophisticated, operating across borders and increasingly converging with cyber-enabled fraud, document fraud, money laundering, and other forms of organized crime. People can now be trafficked into scam centres and forced to carry out romance scams, investment fraud, cryptocurrency scams and voice phishing, turning victims themselves into instruments of a much larger criminal enterprise. They adapt quickly because they understand something simple: they do not create vulnerability. They exploit it.
Our understanding of prevention should evolve just as quickly.
The survivor I spoke with knew exactly what exploitation could look like. They knew the warning signs. They understood the risks far better than they had before.
What they could not leave behind was the reason they migrated in the first place.
Their family still depended on them. The debt was still there. The need to earn an income had not changed. They hoped the next opportunity would be different.
That conversation stayed with me.
Until then, I had thought of prevention as something that happened before trafficking. I no longer see it that way.
We often ask why survivors choose to migrate again.
I think the better question is why so many return home with so few alternatives.
Migration itself is not the problem. Millions of Indonesians live and work overseas, seeking better opportunities and building better futures for themselves and their families. Preventing trafficking should never mean discouraging migration. It should mean making migration safer.
I also asked survivors why they had not used official migration channels.
None of them told me they were unaware of the procedures.
Instead, they described processes that felt complicated, slow, and disconnected from the urgency of their lives. When someone needs to repay debt or support their family, waiting months to secure work abroad may simply not feel realistic. Informal recruiters promise immediate departures and immediate income. In moments like these, urgency often outweighs caution.
The same reflection applies after people return home.
Indonesia's legal framework, particularly the Anti-Trafficking Law (Law No. 21 of 2007), recognizes victims' right to restitution. This framework is further supported by Government Regulation No. 7 of 2018 on the Provision of Compensation, Restitution and Assistance to Witnesses and Victims, as amended by Government Regulation No. 35 of 2020, which sets out procedures for the provision of restitution and related assistance. Yet organizations working directly with survivors continue to report that obtaining court-ordered restitution remains a significant challenge. Court proceedings take time. Enforcement is often difficult. Daily expenses cannot wait. By the time legal processes conclude, many survivors are still facing the same financial pressures that shaped their original decision to migrate.
The conversation should also extend beyond those who are formally identified as trafficking victims.
In recent years, many Indonesians have been repatriated from online scam compounds and other exploitative situations overseas. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has reported handling more than 6,800 online-scam-related cases involving Indonesians across 10 destination countries since 2020. Not everyone will meet the legal definition of a trafficking victim, and each case must be assessed individually. But legal status does not erase lived experience. Many return having endured deception, coercive working conditions, abuse, or significant financial loss. Whatever their legal status, many face the same uncertainty about how to rebuild their lives.
If prevention ends with repatriation, we risk leaving those vulnerabilities untouched.
That is why I have come to see reintegration differently.
It is often treated as what happens after trafficking. I have come to think of it as part of prevention itself. If people return to the same debt, the same pressure to earn an income, and the same lack of opportunities, then the conditions traffickers exploit have barely changed. Helping survivors rebuild their lives is not simply part of recovery. It is one of the most practical ways to prevent exploitation from happening again.
That shift in thinking should also change how we approach reintegration. It cannot be treated as a one-time intervention that ends once someone has returned home. Rebuilding a life takes time. Survivors often need sustained access to employment opportunities, skills training, psychosocial support, legal assistance, and financial services as they navigate recovery and regain stability. No single programme can eliminate vulnerability, but a longer-term approach to reintegration can help ensure that returning home becomes the beginning of a new chapter rather than the start of another cycle of risk.
The same is true for safe migration pathways. They must not only exist. They must also be practical, accessible, and responsive to the realities people face. If the safest option is also the hardest to reach, many people will continue choosing the fastest one.
Success should not be measured only by the number of awareness campaigns we conduct or traffickers we prosecute, important as those efforts are. It should also be measured by whether people return home with more choices than they had before they left.
If World Day Against Trafficking in Persons asks us to rethink one thing this year, I hope it is this: prevention does not end when someone is rescued or repatriated.
It ends when people no longer have to risk exploitation simply to earn a living.
Andrean Sangabie Sancaya is a development professional with years of experience in migrant protection, counter-trafficking initiatives, human rights advocacy, and gender equality. Sancaya is currently a Programme Officer for Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).