Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

  The details are coming together for our ninth annual panel discussion at Millikin University for Human Trafficking Prevention Month on January 28 at 6:00 pm. Our theme this year is "Labor Trafficking" and it will feature local experts working on this issue in Central Illinois. I am still working on a few panelists but this panel discussion will round out events held around the United States for Human Trafficking Prevention Month 2026. Stay tuned for our announcement of the panelists!

On Friday I was really honored to be featured on a professional development panel "Academic Entrepreneurship: Launching and Leading Centers, Labs, and Institutes" for Women in Legislative Studies. I as asked to speak about the Human Trafficking Research Lab and my experience starting a lab at a small liberal arts college. My lab was featured with the Director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College and the Director of the Hispanic Research Center at Arizona State University. It was great to share the space with these labs even though my experience of building a lab from scratch was very different from these established labs at major research institutions.  Still, I was happy to share my experience, the HTRL manual , and the things I wish I would have known before building a lab. I wish I would have had more training on being a boss and accountability measures which I have learned but sometimes it has been challenging. I also wished I have taken a clas...

Today I participated in the 24-hour Conference on Global Organized Crime, an entirely online conference with 300 experts and over 20 sessions attended by people around the world. I presented the research from our National Science Foundation project on a "Transnational dimensions of human trafficking in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine." This panel explored how armed conflict, forced displacement, weakened governance, and new technologies have fueled trafficking, with a particular focus on children and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Drawing on research and frontline practice, the session examined evolving typologies of conflict-related trafficking, including forced labor, sexual exploitation, and recruitment into combat roles, as well as domestic labor exploitation of vulnerable groups. By weaving together legal, psychological, and political science perspectives, the discussion situated Ukraine’s experience within wider debates on organized crime in conflic...

Today is  International Day for the Abolition of Slavery an important day during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence November 25-December 10. This day is important because it marks the date of the adoption of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others on December 2, 1949. This was the first human trafficking related convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and it set the stage for how exploitation was viewed in the post WWII years. One this day every year the focus is on eradicating contemporary forms of slavery, such as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, the worst forms of child labour, forced marriage, and the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict. While human trafficking has evolved since the original adoption of this convention in 1949 the crime still persists and manifests in different ways in the 21st century with links to ...

All fall semester the HTRL has been working with the Legal Aid Society Office in Decatur to revamp and revive the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force. We sent out a survey in September looking for feedback. Then based on the fact that the vast majority of the respondents wanted to continue the task force and saw value in continuing the work we scheduled the first meeting in 2025. Due to staff turnover and the non-renewal of the federal grant we are working as a volunteer task force so no one had stepped up to take up the work to try and organize a meeting since December 2024. We decided that Legal Aid Society would run the meetings and the HTRL would run the logistics so we set the agenda and my student Cassidy took the meeting minutes. We had a few technical difficulties trying to change the meeting from Teams to Zoom because after you send a meeting invite I couldn't change the link but most people were able to come over to the Zoom meeting. We compiled and presented th...

After starting this research project in Fall 2020, I am happy to say that we have finally finished the analysis from our adjudication project. Like all of our research projects in the lab we formulated a research brief based on our results which can be read here . It took five years to file 66 Freedom of Information Requests for arrest records from 2010-2020 and then analyze 326,719 arrests from the 16 counties where we received data. In total, we filed requests to 40 States’ Attorneys offices, 19 Sheriff's Offices, four with County Clerks offices, two FOIA Officers, and one with a Public Access Bureau. Then, we conducted three cycles of coding analyzing public records (legal search databases, local court documents, and newspapers) related to the case for elements of human trafficking. Our analysis of ‘second generation’ state level human trafficking related cases between 2010-2020 revealed that the majority of the state-level trafficking-related cases in Central Illinois were char...

I was able to attend the Illinois Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force meeting yesterday while I was traveling and it was eye opening. Social service providers in my break out groups reported a decrease in foreign born forced labor survivors/victims coming forward because they are afraid to seek help or even leave their houses and go outside due to immigration enforcement. Others reported an increase in victims/survivor numbers but agreed that there are long last impacts and significant impediments to identification with the large scale immigration enforcement across the state. Many organizations now have to offer online services to meet the needs of their clients because otherwise people would not seek assistance. In addition to the significant federal funding cuts for human trafficking victim services this is just another worrying trend that is emerging from the current administration that inhibits anti-trafficking work around the United States.