Book

Description

Official trafficking statistics count only the victims who surface: those who are identified, prosecuted, or assisted. But what about the ones who never do?Fear of retaliation, social exclusion, economic dependency, and institutional mistrust keep an entire population of trafficking victims outside every register, every case file, every service record — individuals who experience exploitation while remaining, in the fullest sense, invisible.Risk of Victims' Pure Invisibility (RVPI) introduces a new way of thinking about this gap. Rather than trying to count what cannot be seen, the RVPI Framework diagnoses the territorial and institutional conditions under which victims are structurally prevented from being seen at all. Built on three analytical pillars — Vulnerability Pressure, Institutional Protection Deficit, and Environmental Silence — it treats the absence of reporting not as missing data, but as a governance signal in its own right.Grounded in governance diagnostics, dark-figure criminology, and survivor-centered critique, and designed without collecting any personal data or enabling any form of surveillance, RVPI offers policymakers, international organizations, and researchers a sovereignty-respecting tool for redirecting anti-trafficking efforts: from the pursuit of individual cases toward the reform of the institutions that keep victims from ever being found.A rigorous, ethically grounded contribution to anti-trafficking governance, this book reframes invisibility itself as a problem for institutions to solve — not a mystery for victims to overcome alone.