To browse Academia. Their generosity humbles me. Much of the research on human trafficking focuses on the prosecution of traffickers and protection of survivors after the crime has occurred. Less is known about the social disparities that make someone vulnerable to trafficking. This project examines human trafficking from a preventive focus, using data from a case study of service providers working with at-risk populations in the Kansas City, MO-KS area.
The research team conducted 42 in-depth interviews with service providers working in the medical, educational, legal, and social services sectors from to Participants identified risk factors that could make someone vulnerable to labor or sexual exploitation. These factors clustered into four key areas: economic insecurity, housing insecurity, education, and migration.
The research findings also suggest that human trafficking may be driven by an accumulation of risk factors that move vulnerable persons closer to labor exploitation and sex trafficking, fitting with a chai In this article I point to some common pitfalls and particular challenges in research on human trafficking. I start out by presenting some of the challenges in identifying observable populations and behaviours, arguing that primary data collection in the trafficking field should focus on former victims, and not current victims or persons at risk.
Thereafter I discuss some of the factors that have inhibited the development and use of explicit operational definitions of trafficking. Third, I present some of the challenges in identification of trafficking victims, when the victims themselves do not want to identify with the trafficking label. Finally, the usefulness of different research strategies in the trafficking fields for the current knowledgeneeds is discussed.
This special issue focuses on a crime that has been classified by the United Nations as the third most profitable crime in the world -human trafficking Fichtelberg The genesis for this collection evolved out of a major project led by Philip Reichel which was completed in Reichel and an international team examined Canadian and US practices of combating human trafficking.
