Human Trafficking Hotline Article Submission

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 identify trafficking trends before victims are identified due to the one-two year lag in identification during war. Hotline data also revealed that the oblasts with the largest number of potentially identified victims also had the highest number of calls to the hotline suggesting that potential victims align with frequency of calls from different oblasts.

Thanks to the help of our contacts at the IOM Office in Ukraine and the local NGO that runs the hotline this article is the third article ever to examine human trafficking hotline data (two have been published on the United States and one has been published with hotline data in the United Kingdom) and the first to examine these calls in a source country during war. It is a unique dataset that was only possible for us to analyze due to our contacts in Ukraine and we are indebted to them for their willingness to trust us with such an important task during Russia's war on Ukraine.