Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

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 ...

Last night we hosted our Ninth Annual Human Trafficking Prevention Month panel discussion on Labor Trafficking at Millikin! We had a great discussion from a variety of perspectives on an understudied aspect of human trafficking. Our local expert panel comprised of Jane Flanagan (Director, Illinois Department of Labor, attorney), Romina Hendrzak (Regional Coordinator, Anti I-Trafficking Services U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants), Katrina Quillen (Supervising Attorney, Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Family Services), and Salem Starr (Human Trafficking Survivor Advocate) were an amazing group.  We discussed how labor trafficking manifests in our region. While most of the victims and survivors of labor trafficking in the United States are foreign born victims trafficked to the United States from other countries. However, we also do increasingly see intersections with sex and labor trafficking where people are exploited in various ways including forced criminality where tra...

My student research assistant Cassidy was sick so I had to brave it alone on WSOY Byers & Co this morning to talk about our panel discussion tonight on labor trafficking at Millikin as part of Human Trafficking Prevention Month. I definitely was not prepared to talk about the weather and who I am going to cheer for in the Superbowl but you can listen in to hear me attempt to talk about sports! The focus of the interview was our highlighting our panel discussion and research in the lab and you can listen at the link below.  

  Last year at our Global Slavery Summit at Millikin we had an advocacy table with postcards to Representatives Mary Miller and Nikki Budzinski asking for their vote on HB 4323 Trafficking Survivors Relief Act (TSRA). This bill would help survivors clear their criminal record for federal crimes and hopefully create a pathway for the states who do not have something similar to do the same so that a vacatur clause is available across the US on numerous levels of governance. Having a criminal record from their exploitation is the one of the large impediments survivors face after their victimization limiting their access to employment and housing. Advocacy for this bill has been ongoing for the past ten years and it was reintroduced during the 119th Congress. It passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate in December 2025 and was signed into law on January 23, 2026. The house suspended the rules to adopt the bill so we can't see how they voted but we hope that our postca...

One easy way to raise awareness during Human Trafficking Prevention Month is reading a proclamation at the city council meeting. I have been doing this with students since 2019 and it has been a great opportunity to meet city officials and spend a moment during the public meeting to recognize human trafficking in our community. We were able to go to the Decatur City Council meeting again this year with my student research assistant Cassidy. She got to shake hands with the mayor and get her signature on proclamation. It was pretty easy to set up via a colleague on the council and there were lots of models to look at for inspiration online if you would like to set this up in your own community! 

Human Trafficking Prevention Month is always an interesting time to learn more about the topic and this year there are several webinars which are free to attend and related to policy advocacy or data. Today, I attended a discussion on "2026 Federal Human Trafficking Policy Priorities: Let the Data Speak" sponsored by Polaris and Allies Against Slavery focused on three key federal bills: Trafficking Survivors Relief Act, Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, and the National Human Trafficking Database Act. It was interesting to learn more about the policy gaps in prosecution, services, and national coordination especially in data compilation on the federal level. We received legislative summaries for all of the bills and advocacy talking points with the key goals of the bills. I was most interested in learning about Florida's SB 7064 adopted in 2023, which created a Statewide Data Repository for Anonymous Human Trafficking Data at the University of South Flor...