HUMAN TRAFFICKING
During Economics 397 class on April 21, Dr. Wooten began a lesson a prostitution. He explained to us that sex work, along with drug use and gambling, are three crimes that we consider “victimless.” He went on to say, however, that this idea is not necessarily true. There can be third parties affected by these crimes, even if they are not immediately apparent. An unintended consequence of sex work that creates many victims is human trafficking. I remember hearing about Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire sex-trafficker, for the first time and being both utterly disgusted and absolutely fascinated at the same time. As a young woman, I often have fears of being kidnapped and becoming the victim of a human trafficking operation. For these reasons, I wanted to look deeper into the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States, which is what led me to my DIY project topic.
For this project, I looked at human trafficking cases across the United States from 2013 to 2019, broken down by state and region. Using human trafficking data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer and state population statistics from the US Census Bureau, I was able to create different measures to compare human trafficking across the United States. One measure used to create all three visualizations is the “actual count” measure. This measure is the number of human trafficking offenses that were reported in a state during a given year. This metric includes two types of offenses, commercial sex acts which the FBI defines as “inducing a person by force, fraud, or coercion to participate in commercial sex acts, or in which the person induced to perform such act(s) has not attained 18 years of age,” and involuntary servitude which the FBI defines as “obtaining of a person(s) through recruitment, harboring, transportation, or provision, and subjecting such persons by force, fraud, or coercion into involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2018).
In the stacked area chart, the number of occurrences of these two types are compared to one another and are broken down by the four regions of the United States: West, South, Northeast, and Midwest. For the hex map and the bump chart, the “actual count” is used in a calculated field that was created to account for population differences among states. The human trafficking incidence rate was calculated by dividing the “actual count” by each respective state’s population and then multiplying by 100,000. Therefore, all data presented on the hex map and bump chart are measured per 100,000 residents. The incidence rate was used in the bump chart to distinguish and rank which ten states had the highest human trafficking incidence rates in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. The FBI only started accepting data on human trafficking from states in 2013. Even with this collection, not all states have the ability to report this data, so while the data is becoming more robust now, there was very little of it at first. This is why the state ranking on my dashboard runs from only 2016 to 2019 instead of 2013 to 2019 like the rest of the dashboard. Up until 2016, there were not even ten states reporting data on human trafficking, so a ranking before that point in time proves somewhat useless.
What is concerning is that incidences of human trafficking have been increasing over time. In all regions of the United States, there has been an increase in the number of human trafficking incidences since 2013 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2020). Many people, such as Abby Kuzma, a writer at The Echo, are also concerned about this and draw comparisons between human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Kuzma discusses how human trafficking preys on the most vulnerable members of society: children. Many children lose their entire lives to human trafficking, being subject to sexual assault, violence, addiction, and receiving an incredible amount of trauma along the way. Many turn a blind eye to human trafficking which is why it has been able to continue. The media glorifies prostitution in many ways and forgets about the victims – the average age of death for someone involved in prostitution is 34. Kuzma posits that no person chooses to be a victim of human trafficking, but that as long as there is a market (a $150 billion one at that), there will continue to be victims. Kuzma writes that there are steps that can be taken to reduce human trafficking which revolve around educating the general public and focusing on penalizing the sex buyers. If we do this, we may be able to reduce the market demand (Kuzma, 2021).
Overall, I was a bit surprised by this data. I thought human trafficking would yield much higher numbers across the United States than what I found. Most states have an incidence rate that is below five cases per 100,000 residents. The state with the highest rate in 2019 was Nevada with about six reported incidences per 100,000 residents. This is still about 170 total incidences based on Nevada’s population. 170 people losing their freedom and becoming victims to human trafficking is still 170 too many and, because the data is not incredibly robust, there are almost certainly more victims than that. There are many reasons why the data may not be as mountainous as I was expecting. One reason could be that many sex trafficking rings do not get caught. They are very secretive and careful about their dealings. If they are not caught, there are no incidences to report. Another reason, as I discussed before, is the recency of this data collection. Not all states, cities, and counties report on sex trafficking as some do not have the capabilities to do so. As the data collection becomes more robust, hopefully we will be able to see where more incidences are occurring and focus our attention there to reduce the number of victims of human trafficking in the United States.
References
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2020, September 28). Crime Data Explorer. https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2018, September 4). Human Trafficking. FBI. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/additional-data-collections/human-trafficking.
Kuzma, A. (2021, March 25). Human trafficking is today's slavery. The Echo. https://www.theechonews.com/article/2021/03/7vdsj4ia1bpxrri.
US Census Bureau. (2021, March 9). State Population Totals: 2010-2019. The United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-state-total.html.