Measuring Sex and Labor Trafficking in the General Population

• In Event: Innovative Data Collection Efforts on Human Trafficking

Abstract

A challenge of human trafficking research has been to identify those individuals who have been victimized by these crimes. Scholars have historically sought to identify victims in high-risk populations—or individuals who are known to have vulnerability indicators associated with trafficking (e.g., child welfare involvement). However, the field of victimology more generally has administered self-report surveys with behaviorally specific language to the broader population to identify and understand difficult-to-measure crimes. The idea being that not everyone self-identifies as a “victim” even if their experiences can legally be classified as such, which allows self-report surveys to tap into these experiences without relying on formal reporting systems. The current study expands this line of work to determine whether it is feasible to measure experiences of sex and labor trafficking victimization in the population without labeling these experiences as “human trafficking.” Thus, the current study administered a self-report survey with behaviorally specific language to a national sample of adults in the general population (N = 1,700). Analyses are pending. However, the findings from this study can inform whether broader population surveys are useful for understanding who is—and is not—likely to experience human trafficking beyond the important research involving high-risk populations.

Authors

• Teresa C. Kulig, University of Nebraska at Omaha

• Leah C. Butler, University of Nebraska at Omaha