Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

The last month with the Human Trafficking Research Lab have been a busy one. I’ve been sitting in on a lot of meetings and taking notes and have been working on finalizing an updated research brief which we will present at the next Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force (CIHTTF) meeting in May.  One particular meeting I want to talk about was last month when Dr. Dean and I presented our adjudication data to the Illinois Bar Association. So, firstly I want to talk about just how cool it was to be in a Zoom meeting with a bunch of people who work in the field I hope to get into. It was pretty neat to get to meet various lawyers and law professors. Now the actual presentation is a completely different story. To everyone who was in the meeting, the presentation seemingly went off without a hitch. For me, my screen went completely black right before I was to present so I had to wing it. Firstly, I was muted and couldn’t click on the screen to unmute myself, but luckily remembered...

As a part of the data collection process for the lab’s analysis of the adjudication of human trafficking in Illinois, I have recently analyzed arrest records for Douglas County, with a specified focus on cases pertinent or possibly relating to human trafficking. When focusing on cases, I had a clear list of relevant arrest types, primarily focusing on domestic violence arrests, sexual violence arrests, and sex crimes in general.  When analyzing Douglas County’s data, it was intriguing to see the particular aspects of data that Douglas County requires when reporting arrests.  Specifically, the race of arrestees was not recorded for the entirety of the records analyzed. This is interesting, as race and gender are particular aspects of the arrest data that we attempt to analyze. Thus, Douglas County’s records are much less thorough than many other counties in Illinois, as the majority require the reporting of the race of the arrestees. In addition to this interesting finding, the...

I was asked to be on a roundtable on publishing your first book sponsored by the Women's Caucus at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference to talk about my book Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia . It was a really fun panel to be on with some big names in my field of gender and politics including Nazita Lajevardi, Christina Wolbrecht, and Julia Hellwege and there were many stories told and laughs all around at books coming out during the pandemic. I enjoyed reliving the trials and tribulations of publishing a book at an under-resourced teaching institution and talking about what I am trying to do differently the second time around. It was also useful to find out about more about book conferences and hiring copy editors which I would like to do the second time around with outside funding.  In the future, I hope to return to Ukraine so I can donate the remaining copies of my book that have been sitting in my office since 2020. I plan to donate copies...