During the years 2010-2012, EU Member States registered 30,146 victims of trafficking in human beings.

During the same period, 8,551 prosecutions against traffickers were reported across the EU. 80 percent of victims of trafficking were female, and over 1,000 child victims were registered as trafficked for sexual exploitation. This data is part of a statistical report on victims and perpetrators of trafficking released Wednesday by the European Commission.

A report also shows that many concrete measures against this severe human rights violation have been undertaken during 2010-2014, such as better cooperation with civil society, and guidelines issued to border authorities and other stakeholders on how to better identify victims.

Over the three year period covered by the data, the top five countries of citizenship within the EU, in terms of absolute numbers of registered victims, were Romania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Hungary and Poland.

Victims from some non-EU countries are registered across many Member States; others are overwhelmingly registered in one or two EU countries. To avoid population sizes of countries having an effect on the interpretation of the statistics, a registered victim prevalence rate has been calculated for victims of trafficking, by expressing the number of registered victims with citizenship of a particular country as a proportion of that country's population, averaged across 2010-2012.

Under this indicator, Bulgarian, Romanian and Latvian citizens were the most likely to come into contact with authorities as victims of trafficking in the period 2010-2012, both in their own country and in the EU as a whole. Bulgarian and Romanian citizens were also most likely to be registered in another EU country as victims of trafficking.

Similarly to the statistics on victims, around two thirds of suspected traffickers were EU citizens (69%). The top 5 EU countries of citizenship were Bulgaria, Romania, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. Not all Member States were able to provide data, so the figures on suspected traffickers should be treated with caution.

Bulgaria, Latvia and Hungary reported for all three reference years that all suspected traffickers were citizens of their country. On the other hand, Italy reported that under 15% of suspected traffickers held Italian citizenship, across all three years. Italy was the only Member State to report such a low percentage of its own citizens among suspected traffickers consistently over the three years.

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