South Dakota Human Trafficking Task Force

I have been having meetings with various stakeholders in South Dakota talking about the possibility of establishing a statewide human trafficking task force. Currently, the state has two separate task forces the East River Human Trafficking Task Force and the West River Human Trafficking Task Force. Both of these regional task forces are in different stages of development and continuity. Due to some issues with victim service organizations they have never unified and it has been the goal of Attorney General's  Office and the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault to start a statewide task force.

During these meetings I being examples of research from the lab to show people the type of work that we do. One thing that I have been using in our meetings is a policy brief and article Multi-Sector Human Trafficking Task Forces in the United States: Typologies and Overlapping Jurisdictions published back in 2022. In that article we mapped 227 task forces across the 50 states, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam. One of our interesting findings was that California, Nevada, Virginia, South Dakota, and Pennsylvania were the five states with
no state level human trafficking task forces. So the map shows a blaring hole for South Dakota with only one of the regional task forces and that has been useful in showing how prevalent the statewide task forces are in the US. It's funny that when we did this research back in 2019 I didn't realize that it would help me seven years later in advocating why we need a statewide task force in South Dakota. We are hoping to get a meeting organized in January in Pierre for Human Trafficking Awareness Month so hopefully it will come to fruition.

Overall, I feel fortunate to come to South Dakota with my experience on several state task forces (Kansas, Georgia, Illinois) at a time when it seems like there is momentum to get things started in the state. I hope the lab and me and my students can offer a neutral presence and help with the logistics and advising the task force in the future! 

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