Følgeevaluering av strategien mot menneskehandel

Norway's national strategy against human trafficking runs until 2030, with eighteen measures across five ministries. Fafo is evaluating it throughout the strategy period, tracing whether the measures are put into practice, whether the agencies involved manage to coordinate their efforts, and what the strategy can ultimately be said to have contributed. A central challenge is that responsibility for identifying possible victims is spread across many agencies, and that the field itself is shifting, from a long-standing focus on trafficking for prostitution toward the exploitation of children and young people and digitally organised forms of crime.

Norway has a national strategy against human trafficking for the period 2025–2030, comprising eighteen measures across five ministries and coordinated by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Fafo is following and assessing the strategy throughout the period, providing the ministry and the sectors involved with knowledge along the way, so that efforts can be adjusted while the strategy is still under way.

The strategy rests on an assumption that is rarely made explicit: that coordination across sectors narrows the room for exploitation more than the individual measures would on their own. It is this interplay the evaluation puts to the test.

The difficulty is that responsibility for identifying possible victims is dispersed across many agencies, and that the boundaries with adjacent phenomena are blurred, particularly the grey zone bordering serious labour-market crime, where severe exploitation is often dealt with under criminal provisions other than the trafficking statute. The field itself has also changed. Where attention was long directed at trafficking for prostitution, the picture today is broader: the exploitation of children and young people for criminal purposes, and digital patterns of recruitment in which criminal services are offered as a commodity, crime-as-a-service.

This diversity places new demands on who must cooperate, and makes coordination more complex.

The evaluation is built around three questions that follow a temporal progression: whether the measures are put into practice as intended, whether coordination across agencies works, and what can ultimately be attributed to the strategy and should be carried forward.

We combine qualitative and quantitative methods with contribution analysis, and anchor the user perspective among the actors working closest to those at risk, who know where the support system reaches people or fails them.

Fafo combines long research experience from the fields of human trafficking and working life with substantial expertise in migration and integration, vulnerable groups and living conditions, a breadth well suited to a field where exploitation, working life and marginalisation intersect.

The project is carried out together with VID Specialized University and Samfunnsøkonomisk analyse, with an academic advisory panel from the University of Oslo, VID and the University of Bergen. It delivers annual status reports, a mid-term report and a final report