Sex Trafficking in the Digital Age: Contextualizing Challenges Associated with Establishing Prevalence Data

Sex trafficking existed before the conception of the Internet, but the arrival of a world-wide network increased traffickers’ reach and anonymity, potential victims’ vulnerability, and buyers’ selection. This roundtable session will examine how the digital age has affected sex trafficking, and the data used to analyze the prevalence of sex trafficking. Presenters will discuss the obstacles researchers face when attempting to gather prevalence data regarding sex trafficking and possible digital solutions being implemented to aid researchers.

With an Internet connection, sex traffickers can advertise trafficking victims from anywhere in the world. When the trafficker decides to relocate the victim, they can easily change the name and number associated with the victim online. Traffickers can link the victim’s contact information to a “burner” cell phone that authorities often cannot connect to a real identity at all. However, data mining initiatives allow researchers and law enforcement agencies to gather and analyze data from webpages that potentially contain sex trafficking information. For example, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created the Memex program in order to index the data from webpages on the Deep Web in a way similar to how popular search engines index the webpages most users access every day.

Presenters will discuss the role of contextual factors salient to the measurement of sex trafficking and offer suggestions for enhancing the measurement of sex trafficking in interdisciplinary research.  The presenters, who come from various research fields including computer science, social work, criminal justice, and digital forensics, will share their experiences working together on research teams to combat sex trafficking locally, as well as within national and international settings.  The goal of this interdisciplinary roundtable discussion is to stimulate conversation that will promote understanding of the shared contributions and challenges of prevalence research regarding sex trafficking, ways to further integration across disciplines and topics by using digital forensics to address research questions that will inform new prevention and intervention strategies for victims/potential victims, and emerging areas of scholarship and practice.  Gathering and analyzing data in new ways will allow for a greater understanding of how sex trafficking is being performed in the digital world by providing insight into the modus operandi of sex traffickers, and will provide valuable information about the victims themselves.