A/HRC/29/38 violence, racial inequality and migration are some of the underlying factors that cause/contribute to trafficking in persons. 9. No country or region is spared the crime of trafficking in persons, which can occur everywhere — at the national, subregional, regional, transcontinental and international levels. Recent trends reveal that victims tend to be trafficked from poor countries to more affluent ones within a region. Similarly, there is also a correlation between the affluence of a destination country (measured by its gross domestic product) and the share of victims trafficked there from other regions (transregional trafficking). Richer countries attract victims from a variety of origins and countries, whereas less affluent countries are mainly affected by domestic or subregional trafficking flows.2 10. Moreover, trafficking in persons has been identified as a problem across a variety of economic sectors, including those integrated into global markets. It has been reported that the economic sectors most exposed to trafficking in persons include agriculture and horticulture, construction, garments and textiles, hospitality and catering, mining, logging and forestry, fishing, food processing and packaging, transportation, domestic service and other care and cleaning work. In those cases, trafficking in persons may be carried out by businesses and/or their business partners, including suppliers, subcontractors, labour brokers or private recruitment agencies, often because of the motivation to derive economic benefits from exploitable labour or services provided by trafficked persons or because of unmonitored or unregulated supply chain practices (see A/67/261, paras. 8–12). It is worth mentioning that in such cases trafficking in persons can and does occur without the transfer of victims from one place to another. The focus should therefore be on the exploitation, rather than the way the person has reached the destination country. B. Trafficking and mixed migration flows 11. Trafficking in persons, especially women and children, is a multifaceted issue that is often interlinked with so-called mixed migration flows, encompassing various categories of persons on the move, including refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and other migrants3 travelling, mostly in an irregular manner, along similar routes, using similar means of travel, but for different reasons.4 Trafficking victims do not necessarily immediately enter the mixed migration flow process as trafficked persons, but might become trafficked during their journey or when they reach a transit or destination country. Their migration might often have started out through smuggling, but then have turned into trafficking at a later stage. Initial consent to a migration project, be it regular or irregular, does not imply that a case has necessarily to be qualified as smuggling. Rather, when migrants are placed in abusive and exploitative situations during their journey or at their destination, and when their rights are drastically limited or completely denied, the case in question has to be qualified as trafficking in persons. 12. In fact trafficked persons, like other categories of persons in a migration process, are initially persons pushed into a search for a better life to flee a range of issues, such as poverty, armed conflict, humanitarian crises, torture or other human rights violations, including domestic violence and gender-related persecution. Social and economic vulnerabilities, linguistic isolation, irregular residence status and States’ persistent failure to recognize and protect the human rights of vulnerable and/or undocumented migrants 2 3 4 6 UNODC, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2014, p. 7. International Organization for Migration, International Migration Law: Glossary on Migration (Geneva, 2004), p. 42. See www.unhcr.org/4ec1436c9.pdf.