8,612 research outputs found
Trafficking of Migrant Workers from Romania: Issues of Labor and Sexual Exploitation
Part of a major research project on the forms of forced labor today developed by the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), this paper argues that trafficking for labor exploitation is an emerging issue in Europe and in particular in Romania. Features a detailed comparison of living conditions prior to the emergence of immigration, trafficking, and/or forced labor
A Non-Parametric Learning Approach to Identify Online Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is among the most challenging law enforcement problems
which demands persistent fight against from all over the globe. In this study,
we leverage readily available data from the website "Backpage"-- used for
classified advertisement-- to discern potential patterns of human trafficking
activities which manifest online and identify most likely trafficking related
advertisements. Due to the lack of ground truth, we rely on two human analysts
--one human trafficking victim survivor and one from law enforcement, for
hand-labeling the small portion of the crawled data. We then present a
semi-supervised learning approach that is trained on the available labeled and
unlabeled data and evaluated on unseen data with further verification of
experts.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics 2016
Conference (ISI 2016
Hotels-50K: A Global Hotel Recognition Dataset
Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human
trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help
verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might
move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is
challenging because of low image quality, uncommon camera perspectives, large
occlusions (often the victim), and the similarity of objects (e.g., furniture,
art, bedding) across different hotel rooms.
To support efforts towards this hotel recognition task, we have curated a
dataset of over 1 million annotated hotel room images from 50,000 hotels. These
images include professionally captured photographs from travel websites and
crowd-sourced images from a mobile application, which are more similar to the
types of images analyzed in real-world investigations. We present a baseline
approach based on a standard network architecture and a collection of
data-augmentation approaches tuned to this problem domain
Information Extraction in Illicit Domains
Extracting useful entities and attribute values from illicit domains such as
human trafficking is a challenging problem with the potential for widespread
social impact. Such domains employ atypical language models, have `long tails'
and suffer from the problem of concept drift. In this paper, we propose a
lightweight, feature-agnostic Information Extraction (IE) paradigm specifically
designed for such domains. Our approach uses raw, unlabeled text from an
initial corpus, and a few (12-120) seed annotations per domain-specific
attribute, to learn robust IE models for unobserved pages and websites.
Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach can outperform feature-centric
Conditional Random Field baselines by over 18\% F-Measure on five annotated
sets of real-world human trafficking datasets in both low-supervision and
high-supervision settings. We also show that our approach is demonstrably
robust to concept drift, and can be efficiently bootstrapped even in a serial
computing environment.Comment: 10 pages, ACM WWW 201
A Survey of Operations Research and Analytics Literature Related to Anti-Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is a compound social, economic, and human rights issue
occurring in all regions of the world. Understanding and addressing such a
complex crime requires effort from multiple domains and perspectives. As of
this writing, no systematic review exists of the Operations Research and
Analytics literature applied to the domain of human trafficking. The purpose of
this work is to fill this gap through a systematic literature review. Studies
matching our search criteria were found ranging from 2010 to March 2021. These
studies were gathered and analyzed to help answer the following three research
questions: (i) What aspects of human trafficking are being studied by
Operations Research and Analytics researchers? (ii) What Operations Research
and Analytics methods are being applied in the anti-human trafficking domain?
and (iii) What are the existing research gaps associated with (i) and (ii)? By
answering these questions, we illuminate the extent to which these topics have
been addressed in the literature, as well as inform future research
opportunities in applying analytical methods to advance the fight against human
trafficking.Comment: 28 pages, 6 Figures, 2 Table
Does globalization enhance countries’ ability to combat human trafficking?
There is much literature that argues that human trafficking (HT) is actually a down side of globalization since HT increased dramatically with globalization during the mid-1980s. However, it must be acknowledged that globalization is not the inherent cause of HT but an intermediary that helps to achieve it. Although much literature studies the nexus of globalization and human trafficking, there is a lack of publications to analyze the future impact of globalization on combating human trafficking. This project aims to fill the gap by providing an empirical analysis of whether globalization enhances countries’ ability to combat HT or not. This paper uses Tier Placement from the US Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Reports as measurement of nations’ capacity of combating HT (dependent variable) and trade openness, net FDI and globalization index as measurements of globalization (independent variable). Since the dependent variable is ordinal number with a certain order, this analysis uses ordered logit regression as the model. This paper finds that both globalization index and net FDI have a positive relationship with nations’ ability to combat HT, and therefore confirms that globalization enhances countries’ capacity to prevent HT
Sex trafficking of girls and women : Evidence from Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh
A crucial gap in the trafficking literature from India is the dearth of primary data and micro studies that could be used for vulnerability mapping of the source areas and addressing the identified risk factors. The present paper is a small attempt to contribute to plugging the gap in the context of Andhra Pradesh, identified as a hot spot in the trafficking literature. This paper is based on case studies of 78 women who had been trafficked from their places of origin in Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh to metropolitan cities across India and who have since returned to their homes. The paper attempted to identify the individual and family circumstances that contribute to the causes of trafficking, to highlight in particular the gendered vulnerabilities that set these women up for trafficking, and to capture the process of the trafficking experience. The findings of the study are located in the dynamic interplay of the social structural context and specificities of the district that contribute to causes of trafficking and the individual circumstances and agency of the women. The case studies reported in this paper are a pointer to the compelling urgency of interventions that will go beyond the forced / voluntary divide in trafficking and sex work.Andhra Pradesh, India, trafficking
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