Citation

Dubrawski A, Miller K, Barnes M, Boecking B, Kennedy E. J. Hum. Traffick. 2015; 1(1): 65-85.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/23322705.2015.1015342

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We present a few data analysis methods that can be used to process advertisements for escort services available in public areas of the Internet. These data provide a readily available proxy evidence for modeling and discerning human-trafficking activity. We show how it can be used to identify advertisements that likely involve such activity. We demonstrate its utility in identifying and tracking entities in the Web-advertisement data even if strongly identifiable features are sparse. We also show a few possible ways to perform community- and population-level analyses including behavioral summaries stratified by various types of activity and detection of emerging trends and patterns.

Language: en

Keywords

escort advertisements; human trafficking; machine learning; pattern mining; prostitution