Human Trafficking Research Lab @Augustana University

I am so excited to be returning to classes at Millikin and to my work at the Human Trafficking Research Lab, now located at Augustana University! With me staying at Millikin and Dr. Dean moving to Augustana, there has definitely been a transition period, but I can feel that we are getting back into the swing of things as the new school year settles in.  I have completed pulling and categorizing articles from the Chicago Sun Times and have moved on to the Springfield State-Journal Register. It’s interesting already to see how different these two newspapers are. I have noticed that much of the coverage from the Chicago Sun Times regarding Human Trafficking is related to the crime itself, while more of the Springfield State-Journal Register articles have focused on prevention and community leaders. I’ve been reflecting a lot on the opportunity I had to attend the inaugural Statewide Human Trafficking Conference in Peoria in May, just before the end of last semester. Attending the conf...

I finally submitted the revisions for our adjudication article! I wanted to get it done before school started last week but since I am new and developing a new course my syllabus preparation took longer than anticipated pushing the revisions to this article back. Still I am happy to move my post-it on my publication board from revise and resubmit to under review again. Hopefully after the second round of revisions this article will be accepted.  While I was working on the revisions an interesting story was published in the local news media  Macon County woman says justice denied in trafficking case which highlighted how human trafficking cases are charged and adjudicated for lesser sentences in Central Illinois. This case is exactly the type of case our research focuses on in Central Illinois. Police charged a variety of offenses including domestic battery, promoting prostitution, sexual assault, felon in possession of a weapon and breaking and entering. Then the case was ple...

We have a chapter on "Human Trafficking and Forced Criminality in Wartime" that is forthcoming in later 2026 in an edited volume on Crime and Justice in Wartime Ukraine published by Routledge. The book now has a cover and website  and it is exciting to see this edited volume come to fruition. Our chapter features highlights from our NSF sponsored research. We examine new aspects of human trafficking that have manifested after Russia's invasion especially forced criminality, an emerging aspect of human trafficking that is prevalent in the Russian occupied territories. We will be participating in a book panel at ASEEES in November talking about the book so it will be great to meet the other authors in person and discuss different aspects of the book.

The Human Trafficking Research Lab (HTRL) was established in 2018 and moved to Augustana University in 2026. Our goal is to transform undergraduate service-learning projects into cutting edge human trafficking research. The HTRL team at Augustana University conducts policy relevant research on human trafficking within the United States and internationally. We are the only undergraduate research lab focused on human trafficking in the state of South Dakota and one of a handful in the entire United States, making this applied research experience truly unique for Augustana students. Through the  Human Trafficking Research Lab,  we formulate human trafficking research at Augustana by training students to collect, analyze, and write up data results and disseminate these findings to the academic and local community. At Augustana University, our mission provides an education of enduring worth that challenges the intellect, fosters integrity and integrates faith with learning an...

Big news, the Human Trafficking Research Lab has moved to Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota! We are working to get our research space set up here and I am hoping to be able to hire a student research assistant so that we can continue our localized human trafficking research in South Dakota. I also have lofty goals of learning more about possible changes to the law to make it more victim-centered and hope to join a human trafficking task force in the state.  Trying to get some of the funds transferred to Augustana has been a four month long challenge but I am hoping it will work out (keep your fingers crossed for us). Millikin said I could not employ my previous research assistant past May, but thankfully I am able to pay her myself over the summer our of my own pocket so we can continue our narrative policy framework project. I am invested in continuing this research and supporting my previous research assistant to hopefully present at a conference in the future. It...

In June we received another round of revisions on our adjudication research so I have been diving into those this past week to try to get them the article revised and resubmitted before the semester starts. We had a new reviewer who wants us to tackle and clarify some new things and add a methodological appendix which is one of my favorite things! They also wanted us to be more consistent in our terminology and clarify differences with regional characteristics and factors. So I will be doing my best to add all of those things and not push the manuscript too far over the page limit. Hoping for an article acceptance soon! 

Finally, getting back to some of the research from our NSF sponsored research project on human trafficking during the war in Ukraine. It has been a hectic summer and so many decisions came in May and early June when I was traveling with students and did not have time to work on them. Then in July we moved 600 miles across the country so I am trying to get caught up in August before the academic year starts at my new institution. This week I had the opportunity to resubmit our human trafficking hotline article. This article utilizes unique data from 88,939 calls received by the National Toll-Free Migrant and Anti-Trafficking Hotline 527 from September 2021 to September 2023-before and after the full-scale invasion. We explored who accesses the human trafficking hotline during war and how does insecurity for potential migrants manifest during war as they navigate displacement. We determined that hotline data can be a precursor to the human trafficking patterns that follow because it can ...

When I moved to Central Illinois in 2016 one of the biggest worries I had about moving there was the lack of human trafficking community. In Atlanta, I left one of the longest serving task forces in the United States with an excellent infrastructure and organization sponsored by the Governor's Office in Georgia. It took me a few years to find those connections in Central Illinois and many of them had to be created from scratch.  In 2017, I heard about the establishment of a new task force in Central Illinois by State' Attorney Greg Harris at the Department of Justice Office in Springfield and so I wrote asking to be able to contribute. Advocating and using my research with practical applications was something I missed since moving to Illinois and I was really thankful to be on the ground floor with this newly formed task force! The picture above was my first meeting at the DOJ Office in Springfield and this meeting started eight years of collaboration and advocacy in the region...

  Today, I attended the Protection Cluster's Anti-Trafficking Task Force (ATTF) in Ukraine also known as the Оперативної групи з протидії торгівлі людьми Кластеру з питань захисту (ОГПТЛ) in Ukrianian. This is an online meeting that due to funding cuts with USAID and the war has not met since November 2024. So even though I am in the middle of moving I made it a priority to attend and learn about the recent updates to anti-trafficking work in Ukraine. We learned about developments with the State Programme on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings until 2030. It was interesting to hear how the program is aimed at European Union membership and integration commitments. There are special mentions in the program for recruitment in online spaces and the use of online networks by traffickers which was particularly interesting for our research.  We also had a presentation on the different human trafficking cases assisted by the IOM Mission in Ukraine and its Partners in 2024–2025. It w...

We had a virtual Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force meeting today where Cassidy took the minutes. It was nice to see people who I met at the Illinois Statewide Human Trafficking Conference last week in Peoria and talk about recent trends that service providers are seeing. We also discussed the leadership transition as I am moving to South Dakota and the Center for Prevention of Abuse is going to help the Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Family Services Office in Decatur run the task force in the future. I am sad to be moving onto other locations but it was a nice send off after eight years of serving on the CIHTTF and running the meetings for almost three years of that time. It definitely felt like I was one of the longest serving members but I know I am leaving the task force in good hands. 

This week we attended the first ever Illinois Statewide Human Trafficking Conference in Peoria. It was a great educational and networking opportunity. The conference was organized by the Children's Advocacy Centers of Illinois (CACI), Illinois State Police Investigations, Illinois Department of Human Services, and Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The Human Trafficking Research Lab was also asked to present on the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force (CIHTTF) and some of the adjudication research we conducted in the lab. The panel "Lunch & Local Task Force Overview" introduced conference attendees to various task forces in the state, including two OVC-funded Enhanced Collaborative Model task forces, one statewide task force, one task force overseen by a local mayor's office, and one task force covering central Illinois.  The conference was attended by over 300 anti-trafficking advocates around the state and I was able to meet many of t...

This semester, I continued my work as an assistant researcher at the Human Trafficking Research Lab. In January, we kicked off the semester by attending a Decatur City Council meeting, where I had the opportunity to read and present a proclamation recognizing Human Trafficking Awareness Month to the mayor. Throughout the semester, I have worked on collecting articles from throughout Illinois dealing with human trafficking cases for our ongoing research project on the effect of media portrayal on human trafficking legislation.   In March, Millikin hosted a meeting of the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force. I had the opportunity to hear professionals from various fields speak about human trafficking prevention and to network in-person with members of the task force. To cap off the year, we will be attending and presenting at the Illinois Human Trafficking Training Conference in Peoria on May 5th and 6th. It has been a successful year, and I am so excited to continue m...

While I wait for my next round of book revisions I am starting work on the next article in our NSF project that looks at online human trafficking recruitment during Russia's war in Ukraine. This article analyzes the suspicious Telegram data and compares that to interviews from anti-trafficking stakeholders focusing on recruitment dynamics in Ukraine during the full-scale invasion. We examine what recruitment looks like during the war in Ukraine. I am working on the literature review now and it's so interesting to see all of the publications on recruitment that have been published since we started work on this project in 2023.  In the data we compiled on recruitment we found that approximately 15.5% of the total messages on the different Telegram groups were suspicious and could be potential cases of recruitment for human trafficking. The article discusses the array of suspicious recruitment messages that we found in the Telegram Groups including posts over the first 18 month’s ...

We attended Take Back the Night last night at the Decatur Public Library hosted by our local organization Growing Strong Sexual Assault Center. We tabled to support survivors and this local organization while raising awareness and money to support student research assistants in the lab. Take Back The Night is a global mission to end all forms of sexual violence, including sexual assault, sexual abuse, trafficking, stalking, gender harassment, and relationship violence, and to support survivors in their healing journeys . They had an open mix for survivor to chare their stories or read poetry, a crafting station with friendship bracelets, a photo booth, and information about sexual violence. The theme this year was together we rise and looked to promote the voices of local survivors. I was able to see several Millikin students and supporters that I knew from the community. I was also able to hear from a friend and local survivor about the exploitation and abuse she experienced in Macon ...

The Human Trafficking Research Lab will be tabling at Take Back the Night this year on April 16th. We are thankful for the opportunity to support survivors of gender based violence, to share our research and fair trade chocolate with the community and for our collaboration with Growing Strong. While we have attended Take Back the Night for years and I even spoke in 2018 (and won Community Advocate of the Year), we have never hosted a table so I am looking forward to participating and our continued collaboration with Growing Strong, they local sexual assault center in Decatur. 

  The Human Trafficking Research Lab will be tabling at the Vendor's Market at Milli-Fest with more than 50 other local vendors. We will have Lab merch (pins, bags and keychains), Freedom Studios products (candles, bath bombs, and lotion) made by human trafficking survivors, and free fair trade chocolate from Equal Exchange. Stop by on Saturday April 18 from 11:00-2:00 on the quad to learn about our research and support our work!

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 ...

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...