Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

The Human Trafficking Research Lab at Millikin University has been working on a project that is expected to shine the light on human trafficking adjudication in the region of central Illinois. For the past three semesters my duty working in that lab was to analyze arrest data from counties assigned to detect crimes that could have been charged as human trafficking or fall under trafficking category. The past three semesters I analyzed three counties Morgan County, Macon County, and Rock island County. These three counties were not any different to each other. Most offenses committed that could fall under the category of human trafficking were from prostitution, child pornography, and aggravated criminal sexual abuse. This research process involved using a search toolbar to run all the coded crimes and record them into an excel document. As expected in these three counties Morgan only less than one percent of the arrests made were labeled human trafficking while the other 99 percent wer

The Association for the Study of Nationalities gave me a final opportunity to have a book panel on Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia published by Policy Press at the University of Bristol in 2020. The pandemic squashed my original plans for a 2020 book tour in the United Kingdom and then war destroyed my hopes of returning to Ukraine in 2022 to talk about my book and give copies of my book to my Ukrainian colleagues and friends.  This is why I was so excited to get the opportunity to celebrate the publication of my book with a few US based colleagues who were there at the beginning of my research and read through preliminary chapter drafts. My book panel included Cynthia Buckley from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Lauren McCarthy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Nadia Shapkina from Kansas State University and focused on policy responses and failures with human trafficking in Eurasia. We also discussed the implications of forced migration with