Human Trafficking Research Lab @Augustana University

This summer I was contacted by the Illinois Department of Human Services, Office of Adult Services and Basic Supports, Bureau of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Human Trafficking about our research and asked to join the Joint Human Trafficking Work Group. I attended a few meetings online and then at the end of September we had an in-person planning workshop in Springfield and Chicago. The purpose of the work group is to draft a Strategic Plan for Human Trafficking Victim Services & Funding. The group is is focused on creating a systematic approach to looking at how the state of Illinois responds to human trafficking and create systems that assign responsibility to agencies to develop protocols and training to better our responses to identified HT victims/survivors. They wanted to include all stakeholders such as law enforcement, service providers, state agencies, prosecutors and make recommendations through legislation and statutory change. It has been interesting to rev...

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have been working on analyzing respondent data for a survey sent out to members of the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Taskforce as part of the final assessment for the DOJ task force grant. As a Human Services/Psychology student at Millikin, I have analyzed and researched a fair amount of numerical data. It has been an enlightening process to learn how to analyze the data of answers to open-ended questions. At first, I felt challenged by this experience. Eventually, I came to feel grateful for the opportunity to learn something new which will help me as I continue on to graduate school. The survey included questions as to members' overall satisfaction with the task force and suggestions for improvement. The questions were all aimed at finding better ways to assist victims/survivors of human trafficking. While some members were not pleased and did not fully agree with one another on how to better serve this vulnerable population, there we...

We recently calculated and compiled a new Human Trafficking Research Lab Brief with findings from trainings conducted by the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force (CIHTTF) members in 2022 and 2023. We have been tracking and mapping human trafficking trainings since 2019 and it was really interesting to see the progress over the last five years! Thanks to all of the CIHTTF members who conducted and reported their trainings, we could not report this data without you all! You can read the updated brief here . We plan on providing an overall analysis for the trainings from 2020-2024 in our final assessment for the CIHTTF grant so stay tuned for more information showcasing the impact of the CIHTTF. 

President Reynolds featured the Human Trafficking Research Lab as one of the four performance learning opportunities at Millikin University in his state of the university speech last May. This got lab members thinking about the uniqueness of the lab in the United States and the opportunities we provide for hands on research with a complex topic topic such as human trafficking. So the HTRL's newest research assistant Maggie Schrage's first job assignment was conducting an investigation on other research entities focused on human trafficking around the United States. Here is what she found: I was tasked with compiling data on other academic institutions conducting research on human trafficking. After many hours of researching and contacting universities across the United States, I located many legal clinics that help survivors of human trafficking with legal issues in the United States but there were fewer that focused on academic research. I found that the Human Trafficking Rese...