Can Sex Offense Rates Act as a Predictive Measure to Undercover Hidden Areas of Human Trafficking?

• In Event: Poster Session II

Abstract

As a whole, research on human trafficking is relatively scarce even though as the years progress, more and more individuals become interested in becoming involved to combat this form of modern day slavery. Challenges encompassing research in human trafficking, prosecution barriers that elude successful convictions under HT statues combined with a limited source of researchers focused on this problem. To expand on limited existing literature on human trafficking, my research question involves exploring a possible correlation between areas of high sex crime rates and if it can act as a predictive measure to locate areas of human trafficking. This relationship will be investigated through looking into cournt actions filed by prosecutors between 2012-2015 and comparing it to violent crime rates of 21 counties within the state of Florida using data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. It is hypothesized that areas with high sex crime rates will possess the most documented cases of human trafficking.

Author

• Madelyn Diaz, University of Central Florida