The Need for Enhanced Training on Minor Trafficking Across Wide Networks ofProfessionals
Diverse groups of professionals interact with suspected minor trafficking victims and serve as important points for identification and intervention. Understanding what professionals know about these victims but also where knowledge is lacking is essential ensuring victims are identified, services provided, and traffickers are prosecuted. This presentation provides an overview of studies evaluating three groups of […]
Cross border trafficking: Geographies, typologies and experiences of trafficking in personsacross the US-Mexico border
People who migrate into the United States (US) across the southern border are known to be at increased risk for trafficking in persons (TIP) and/or exploitation along the migratory route and are frequently set up for labor and sexual exploitation within the US. While existing evidence suggests the problem of TIP among migrant populations is […]
Dark Enigma: Indexing the Dark Web to Disrupt Human Trafficking Networks
Human trafficking remains one of the most pervasive yet least visible forms of exploitation. Whilepublic attention often focuses on surfacelevel internet platforms, far less scrutiny is given to the role ofthe dark web—particularly The Onion Router (TOR) network—in facilitating the buying and selling ofhuman beings. Dark Enigma is an exploratory research project that seeks to […]
Moving beyond counts: Maintaining Solidarity Through Community-driven data
Across decades of attempted global and national measurement, the prevalence of human trafficking hasremained difficult to determine, with communities continuing to navigate imperfect, inconsistent, andinequitable data systems. Estimates vary widely as evolving systems adapt to high turnover, fundingfluctuations, and persistent societal stereotypes (Tyldum & Bronovskis, 2005; AlejanoSteele, Napolitano& Finger, 2024). In Colorado, efforts to move […]
Building Research Infrastructure to Measure and Disrupt the Illicit Massage Industry Organizational Context
The Network is a data-driven nonprofit focused on measuring and disrupting the illicit massage industry (IMI) in the United States. Rather than centering primarily on advocacy, our core function is the systematic collection, structuring, and operationalization of open-source digital signals that indicate commercial sexual exploitation occurring under the cover of massage businesses. The IMI operates […]
Investigating the Effectiveness of a Continuum of Care for Victims of Transnational Trafficking
Transnational human trafficking cases often collapse at the point of prosecution because survivors disengage from legal proceedings after identification, frequently due to fragmented cross-border support and deep breaches of trust. In concert with an international NGO, we examine a “Continuum of Care,” a survivor-centered cross-border intervention developed in Romania to bridge critical gaps from identification […]
Using LLMs to Detect Online Recruitment for Human Trafficking
Online job advertisements serve as a scalable entry point for deceptive and exploitative recruitment for human trafficking. We propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-driven framework for early-stage detection of recruitment risk in online job advertisements. We define recruitment risk and measure it using fifteen binary signals that reflect economic misrepresentation, information transparency, recruitment pressure […]
“Sex Work” and “Sex Trafficking”: The Significance of Framing in Anti-Trafficking Teaching, Research, andAdvocacy
Scholars and professionals working in the anti-trafficking arena know that human trafficking has a precise legal definition that includes force, fraud, coercion, or commercial sexual exploitation of a minor. In advocacy and academic work, however, there is a lack of consensus regarding how terms like “sex trafficking” and “sex work” should be used. Some advocacy […]
Why are We Getting Human Trafficking Education and Prevention So Wrong?
The Persistent Erasure of Intersectional Racism in Our Understandings of Missing, Stolen, Exploited, and Trafficked Youth To create effective education and prevention strategies to missing, stolen, exploited, and trafficked (MSET) youth in the United States, we need to disrupt the empirically false dominant racial narratives pervasive in society, driven by biased news media reporting, entertainment […]
The State of Human Trafficking in Mexico: An Overview on Legislation and Trends
Organized crime in Mexico continues to be a major topic of discussion, particularly related to drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human smuggling, and more recently, human trafficking. Mexico criminalized trafficking in persons in 2007, and passed its current human trafficking law, Ley General for short, in 2012. Little is known about Ley General’s subsequent revisions and […]
