About the Study
The anti-trafficking field has grown significantly over the past 25 years. What it has never had is a shared picture of itself.
The National State of the Field Study is Polaris’s effort to build that shared picture and establish a baseline for what comes next. Working alongside researchers, practitioners, and survivor leaders, we’ve mapped the anti-trafficking ecosystem into a comprehensive intervention framework across ten distinct domains of influence. Now we’re asking the people inside those systems what’s working, what isn’t, where connections are strong and where they’re lacking, and what it would take to move forward with shared goals and outcomes.
Throughout 2026, we’re gathering input two ways: a field-wide survey open to anyone doing anti-trafficking work in the U.S., and ten focus groups, one for each system on the map. Together, they’ll help show us where the field is aligned, where it’s fragmented, where efforts overlap, and where real gaps have gone unnoticed.
Built on a Strong Foundation
The National State of the Field Study builds on decades of Polaris research into how exploitation actually works and how systems respond to it. We have mapped the business models behind trafficking, identified the industries positioned to disrupt it, and documented the ways systems fail the people they’re meant to protect. Most directly, it follows the National Survivor Study, the largest survey of 457 survivors. The National Survivor Study asked whether systems are meeting survivors’ needs. This study asks whether those systems are organized to.
The National State of the Field Study is also a reflection of how Polaris works. We listen by gathering community intelligence from across the ecosystem. We translate by turning what we hear into shared language, frameworks, and findings for the entire field. And we coordinate by bringing together the people and institutions positioned to act on that evidence to develop shared priorities and outcomes. This study reflects these three principles.
Why Now?
Movements don’t stay in start-up mode forever.
Twenty-six years after the Trafficking Victims Protection Act built the foundation for a national response, the anti-trafficking field has real depth: thousands of organizations, hard-won expertise, and a far more sophisticated understanding of the problem than we had in 2000. What it doesn’t yet have is the connective tissue that turns a lot of good work into collective impact.
The next evolution of this field is a coordinated national response, and now is the moment to build it. That means shared goals and measures of progress, common language, coordinated strategy, and infrastructure designed to serve the field rather than any single organization. The National State of the Field Study is just the beginning.
What Comes Next?
We’ll begin publishing what we learn in 2027. But publications are only an output of this work.
The first outcome is a shared baseline: a clearer picture of the domains of influence that make up the national anti-trafficking response, how they connect, where they do not, and where intervention capacity is concentrated or missing. For the first time, the field will have shared terminology, a common intervention framework, and national data that includes parts of the ecosystem often missing from the picture. Patterns and gaps that practitioners and survivors have identified for years can move from localized knowledge to documented national evidence.
What comes after is harder and matters even more: organizations building partnerships and setting strategy around evidence rather than proximity or habit; funders directing resources toward documented gaps and the coordination infrastructure the field has never been resourced to build; institutions using evidence to understand and act on their role in preventing exploitation; shared measures of progress; survivor-first data governance; and survivor leaders holding governance seats in field-level structures, not only advisory ones.
The longer-term aim is a field that increasingly operates as a coordinated system and uses this baseline to measure progress, identify emerging gaps, adjust strategy, and hold itself accountable for shared outcomes.
Get Involved!
A comprehensive map of the field only works if everyone’s on it.
Our team has spent months researching and collating the organizations, agencies, companies, coalitions, and individuals who touch human trafficking in the United States. The result is an ambitious attempt to see the field as a whole. It’s also, inevitably, incomplete.
If you or your organization belong on that map and you haven’t yet heard from Polaris about the National State of the Field Study, we want to hear from you. Reach out at data@polarisproject.org
Frequently Asked Questions
Broadly, the goal of the National State of the Field Study (NSS 2.0) is to understand what the anti-trafficking field needs in order to align, act, and sustain collective impact. Building off of the National Survivor Study (NSS 1.0), which asked the question, “What do survivors need to thrive?” this study seeks to answer the question, “What does the field need to succeed?”
Specifically, the study has five primary objectives:
1. Develop and validate a comprehensive Human Trafficking Intervention Framework
2. Develop a systems-based taxonomy of actors across the anti-trafficking ecosystem
3. Conduct structural and relational network analyses
4. Develop shared goals, measures of progress, and common language for the field
5. Build nationally coordinated strategy and infrastructure
The findings for each of these objectives will be shared publicly, as our aim is to create an evidence base that can be utilized by the entire anti-trafficking field.”
We anticipate that there will be multiple external products as a result of this study. The primary will be a public “State of the Field” report, which will include our taxonomies, methods, network analysis, survey results, and focus group insights. Additionally, we intend to use the results of this study as a benchmark for future iterations of this work, allowing us, as a field, to methodically track progress and identify gaps.