Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

During my spring break I was asked to give an online talk to a colleague's EUROP 440 Human Trafficking in Europe class about our human trafficking research during Russia's war in Ukraine. I was recovering from surgery and not feeling 100% so I was happy that Amir one of my co-authors on the project could join me and talk about his work on the project. I gave a talk in person at San Diego State University in April 2024 right after I returned from fieldwork in Ukraine and so it was interesting to see how much our research has progressed over the two years. We covered the Telegram data, interview data, and also included data from our hotline paper so it was a lot to cover in a hour but the students asked great questions and were very well informed on human trafficking. It was also great to think about how we have worked to transform the data to research outputs with two journal articles (under review), a chapter in an edited volume on Crime and Justice in Wartime Ukraine , and the...

We hosted a hybrid Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force meeting at Millikin. It was the first in-person meeting of the CIHTTF in 1.5 years since August 2024 when there was a hybrid meeting in Champaign and the first well attended meeting since January 2024. We had a small but good group in-person and another 25 people online so it was a great opportunity to network and meet people working on human trafficking in Central Illinois. Illinois State Police and Decatur Police Department both attended as well as our Millikin Campus Police so it was wonderful to see a strong showing of law enforcement at the meeting. It is hard to get the task force running off the ground again but I think our four meetings year rotation with two hybrid meetings to allow for networking is a good model. Subcommittees also meet during the off months so the work of the task force is ongoing and we are hoping for improved participation in the future.

This week I gave a lecture at the University of Kansas to students in POLS 471 The Politics of Human Trafficking. My advisor Hannah Britton started the introduction by saying that the class would not have been possible without my human trafficking work and convincing people that this was an issue worthy of study in political science. It was really humbling to have students read my research (the grad students read my book) and know the work I started there many years ago continues.

Our adjudication article received a revise and resubmit so I have been working on the revisions to that article for the last few weeks. Reviewers wanted us to add more aspects to the literature review from the criminal justice literature focusing on prosecutorial discretion, introduce some statistics, and fix the map to make the grey and light blue differences clearer. With all of the comments from reviewers I try to make a list of things that need to be changed in the article and then start working with the list. I was a little apprehensive about trying to add some statistics to what is largely a descriptive study but after delving more deeply into the literature on prosecution rates and and attrition rates of cases from the intimate partner violence literature I feel a bit more confident that I can add some relational tests. Now I am hoping that it doesn't take me a few more months to implement all of these changes!

We had another Illinois Task Force on Human Trafficking meeting today. This is the one time that people from the different regions of Illinois come together and can learn what is happening at the different task forces around the state. There is also usually an educational component where we learn about some emerging trend or study on human trafficking.  This meeting we had a very informative presentation from a Chicago based service provider Emmaus on male victims/survivors of trafficking. I learned that fewer than 2% of the anti-trafficking organizations in the United States have services for male survivors despite the fact that we are seeing increased numbers of male victims. In addition to the lack of services there is also minimal screenings for male victims and services, training on specialized cases of male victims, and housing support for men not just in Illinois but around the country. Men are the majority of labor trafficking victims but boys especially can be victims of s...

We have been working on revisions to our chapter on Human Trafficking and Forced Criminality in Wartime for an edited volume on Crime and Justice in Wartime Ukraine and finally sent the revisions back today. I was especially honored to be asked to write the chapter on human trafficking for the volume which includes chapters on narcotics trafficking, arms trafficking, cultural property trafficking, illicit tobacco, and child trafficking. The book is under contract with Routledge, edited by Yuliya Zabyelina, Oleksii Serdyuk, and Anna Markovska, and will be published later this year. It will definitely be useful for teaching transnational crime in the future since it covers all of the themes from that class and I will be looking forward to teaching some of the chapters in the future.

I was on Latvian Radio's (ne)Diplomātiskās pusdienas podcast today talking about the Epstein files and their connections to Latvia. You can listen to the episode 'Epstīna faili: Cilvēku tirdzniecība – sievietes, vara un Eiropas klusā krīze" here ! Here is the English version of what I said for our non-Latvian speaking audience. Existing research reveals that women from Eastern Europe are more often trafficked and exploited compared to women from other parts of Europe. Since the fall of communism and the opening of borders there has been significant demand for women from this region as they are seen as a commodity to be traded in Western Europe. Eastern European women are othered by West Europeans and Americans. They are fetishized and objectified by men who see them as exotic, so much so, that the academic literature has a name for women trafficked from Eastern Europe and they call them "Natashas" for their seemingly similar facial features and prevalence in the ...