Rebekah Lisgarten, Chief Executive of Stop the Traffik, joins ComplyAdvantage Fintea Chats at the Catalyst event to discuss why why data, collaboration and financial services play a critical role in stopping modern slavery.
Lisgarten explains the origins of the Stop the Traffik organisation which was founded more than 20 years ago after its founder witnessed the devastating reality of child trafficking in India. Stop the Traffik began as a petition to the UN quickly grew into a global movement, helping to push human trafficking into the public consciousness a long time before it was widely understood or discussed.
Stop the Traffik realised that awareness alone wasn’t enough as if trafficking couldn’t be seen, it couldn’t be stopped and that insight led to the creation of the Traffik Analysis Hub, now the world’s richest dataset on human trafficking and Lisgarten explains that this data allows the organisation not only to understand how trafficking happens, but to predict where it is likely to occur and intervene earlier.
A core part of Stop the Traffik’s work focuses on two groups: people at risk of being trafficked, and those with the power to disrupt traffickers. For those at risk, the organisation delivers targeted global campaigns that provide practical information at key moments and for banks and financial institutions, the work is about prevention, making trafficking less profitable and riskier for criminals.
Lisgarten brings powerful perspective from her decade working directly with survivors as again and again, she was told the same thing: the best outcome would have been for trafficking never to happen at all; and that belief underpins her conviction that compliance and financial crime controls can genuinely change outcomes.
Stop the Traffik’s message to the industry is clear: trafficking is not distant or abstract and it happens close to home, and tackling it effectively will require faster conversations, better data sharing and stronger collaboration across sectors.
