A Knowledge Management Approach to Identify Victims of Human Sex Trafficking

Hultgren, Marisa; Whitney, Jessica; Jennex, Murray E.; Elkins, Aaron

doi:10.17705/1cais.04223

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…A positive aspect of social media apps is the ability of law enforcement to use data scraping tools to detect online sex trafficking of minors. They can apply a knowledge management approach to developing strong filters based on data that can aid in identifying potential victims (Hultgren et al, 2018;Whitney et al, 2020;Williams, 2013). Artificial intelligence and facial recognition tools may also help identify young victims in the future.…”

Section: The Role Of Social Media and The Internetmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Social Media, the Internet, and Legislation on Online Minor Sex Trafficking

Cotterill

2023

JDLL

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This paper examines the impact of social media and the internet on the online sex trafficking of minors and assesses the impact of internet laws and legislation designed to stop online sex trafficking. Online sex trafficking of minors has been identified as a significant problem in North America and around the world, generating approximately 32 billion dollars annually. The expansion of the internet over the past 20 years has provided sex traffickers with a new way to conduct business. This article provides a review of the literature (studies, reports, gray material) published between 1996 and 2022. A review of statistics, the role of the trafficker and the characteristics of the victims provide context to the discussion of anti-trafficking laws and legislation. This review was conducted using a critical social theories lens to determine inherent bias in the work, presumed assumptions, structural inequalities, and how the growth of the internet has impacted social change. Findings indicate that the laws and legislation designed to protect victims of sex trafficking have been largely ineffective and that ethical considerations and biased results limit the methodology of many studies.

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Section: The Role Of Social Media and The Internetmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Social Media, the Internet, and Legislation on Online Minor Sex Trafficking

Cotterill

2023

JDLL

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“…Diversify the data sources. Data collection and analysis have helped in the fight against HT in many ways, including the identification of HT victims [63,134,141], informing prevention campaigns [142], and detecting trafficking network behaviors [45,80]. While thorough data analysis lays the necessary groundwork for such discoveries, it relies upon the utilization of a variety of data from disparate sources.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Operations research and analytics to combat human trafficking: A systematic review of academic literature

et al. 2022

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Human trafficking is a widespread and compound social, economic, and human rights issue occurring in every region of the world. While there have been an increasing number of anti-human trafficking studies from the Operations Research and Analytics domains in recent years, no systematic review of this literature currently exists. We fill this gap by providing a systematic literature review that identifies and classifies the body of Operations Research and Analytics research related to the anti-human trafficking domain, thereby illustrating the collective impact of the field to date. We classify 142 studies to identify current trends in methodologies, theoretical approaches, data sources, trafficking contexts, target regions, victim-survivor demographics, and focus within the well-established 4Ps principles. Using these findings, we discuss the extent to which the current literature aligns with the global demographics of human trafficking and identify existing research gaps to propose an agenda for Operations Research and Analytics researchers.

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“…The second approach uses machine learning, data scraping and mining, as well as natural language techniques to discern human trafficking patterns by automatically collecting information from websites dedicated to advertising sex workers' services (Alvari et al, 2016(Alvari et al, , 2017Burbano & Hernandez-Alvarez, 2017;Dubrawski et al, 2015;Hultgren et al, 2018;Portnoff et al, 2017;Szekely et al, 2015;Tong et al, 2017;Whitney et al, 2020). The machine learning algorithm is trained to discern between suspicious and non-suspicious advertisements based on different information.…”

Section: Sex Markets Online Data and Human Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…US-based studies that used data from backpage.com and craiglist.com dominate extant literature in this field (e.g. Latonero 2012;Alvari et al 2017;Hultgren et al 2018;Shahrokh Esfahani et al 2019). Only one study (Skidmore et al, 2018) used non-US based data, utilising manual data collection methods and coding, which resulted in a small sample size and limited geographical coverage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying human trafficking indicators in the UK online sex market

Giommoni

Ikwu

2021

Trends Organ Crim

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This study identifies the presence of human trafficking indicators in a UK-based sample of sex workers who advertise their services online. To this end, we developed a crawling and scraping software that enabled the collection of information from 17, 362 advertisements for female sex workers posted on the largest dedicated platform for sex work services in the UK. We then established a set of 10 indicators of human trafficking and a transparent and replicable methodology through which to detect their presence in our sample. Most of the advertisements (58.3%) contained only one indicator, while 3,694 of the advertisements (21.3%) presented 2 indicators of human trafficking. Only 1.7% of the advertisements reported three or more indicators, while there were no advertisements that featured more than four. 3, 255 advertisements (19.0%) did not contain any indicators of human trafficking. Based on this analysis, we propose that this approach constitutes an effective screening process for quickly identifying suspicious cases, which can then be examined by more comprehensive and accurate tools to identify if human trafficking is occurring. We conclude by calling for more empirical research into human trafficking indicators.

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A Knowledge Management Approach to Identify Victims of Human Sex Trafficking

Cited by 9 publications

References 9 publications

The Impact of Social Media, the Internet, and Legislation on Online Minor Sex Trafficking

The Impact of Social Media, the Internet, and Legislation on Online Minor Sex Trafficking

Operations research and analytics to combat human trafficking: A systematic review of academic literature

Identifying human trafficking indicators in the UK online sex market

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