Origin or destination country?In th

Origin or destination country?
In the context of discussing trafficking flows, the question of whether a given country is more of an origin or destination country is very relevant. Understanding whether a country ‘sends’ or ‘receives’ more trafficking victims is helpful for discerning transnational trafficking dynamics. It is not possible, however, to make a rigid distinction between origin and destination countries. As with any aggregation, such a broad categorization runs the risk of
obscuring important details and highlighting observations that may not be accurate at the micro level. Moreover, domestic trafficking, which is detected in most countries across the world, makes countries origins and destinations simultaneously.
Even if only cross-border trafficking is considered, countries may belong to both categories. Indeed, most countries do, as they detect both outbound trafficking of own citizens and inbound trafficking of foreigners. Only a very few are exclusively origin or destination countries. For this reason, countries may be thought of as being more typical origin or more typical destination countries. While countries play both roles, the majority of the trafficking flows
are either outbound (in the case of a more typical origin country) or inbound (more typical destination).
A more typical country of origin of cross-border trafficking may detect some foreign victims who are being exploited within its territory, but the outbound flow of that country’s citizens for exploitation in other countries will be far larger.
Out of the 78 countries that provided information concerning the citizenship of the convicted offenders, 37 were considered to be more typical origin countries of cross-border trafficking, whereas 41 were considered more typical destination countries. While it should be kept in mind that the diverse national situations cannot be fully captured by such a broad categorization, when looking at the global level, classifying countries as more typical origin or
destination countries of trafficking in persons is nonetheless very useful for trying to understand and describe typical cross-border trafficking flows.