This paper proposes benefits of using service design against organised crime. As a vehicle to this discussion, the focus is an anti-child-trafficking project at Northumbria University in the UK, involving its multidisciplinary Northumbria Crime Prevention Network.
The last 10 years have shown increasing evidence of people trafficking, internationally (DoS, 2010), generally for the purposes of illegal labour and/or sex. A significant fraction of those who are trafficked are children. The majority of these children are in their mid-teens, but some are as young as five years old.
The C4 persona-based critical design process, (Hilton, 2008), is proposed to strategically enable a service design approach to counter organised crime, by first developing the required criminal personas in order to use their competitive perspectives in critical review of the preventative initiatives. Opportunities from such a service design approach, to child trafficking for example would include new means of: interruption or redirection of child trafficking services so that these children end up in legitimate care; also the proposition of considering new opportunities and improvements in child trafficking service routes and processes as a means of second guessing how and where Recruiters, Transporters, and Exploiters, (Van Dijck, 2005), might next be found operating, and then through border and security agencies successfully countered
