Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

Last summer Aimable Ngabo was awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship from Millikin University to conduct research on the adjudication of human trafficking cases in Central Illinois. Millikin's PR team caught up with him recently in the Human Trafficking Research Lab and they talked about his research, future plans, and the benefits of student and faculty collaborative research. We will be presenting our preliminary research findings at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference and then Ngabo will also present a poster at the Judith & G. Richard Locke Poster Symposium as part of Day of Scholarship at Millikin. It's been a busy spring semester in the Human Trafficking Research Lab! Here is the story to learn more about Ngabo and our current research project. 

The second peer-reviewed article to come out of the Human Trafficking was finally published with a research assistant as a co-author Julisa Sierra. The work for this article "Multi-Sector Human Trafficking Task Forces in the United States: Typologies and Overlapping Jurisdictions" began in 2018 with the support of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) at Millikin University which funded Julisa's work. After numerous revisions the article was accepted in late 2021in the Journal of Modern Slavery and then it was finally available in early March. This article focuses on the development and cooperation of human trafficking task forces, anti-trafficking institutions established to combat human trafficking around the US. We use task force as an encompassing term for over 200 human trafficking multi-sector coalitions, working groups, and/or commissions throughout all 50 states at different levels of jurisdiction. Our research determines the origin, scope, and variati