An analysis of federal human trafficking cases, including the effect of prostitution arrests on trafficking charges filed, using publicly-available data from the National Archive of Criminal Justice

Human trafficking for labor and sexual services is a serious crime that incurs severe personal and social costs. Anecdotal evidence and qualitative research indicate that demand for trafficking in the U.S. is associated with increases in the number of migrant workers and the use of internet advertising services, along with the presence of a large military population and a strong local economy. To address this gap in research, this study will use publicly-available data, including National Archive of Criminal Justice Data on federal criminal cases in which the lead charge involves trafficking or a related crime and on prostitution arrests reported to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The study will combine these data with other publicly-available data measuring factors related to demand for trafficking. The study will also use linking files from the Federal Justice Statistics Program that permit defendants and cases to be tracked from arrest to final disposition across multiple datasets.
Using these data, the study will: 1) estimate fixed effects models to analyze the effect of factors relating to demand for trafficking on the incidence of trafficking-related crime; 2) use the fixed effects approach to examine the effect of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 on federal trafficking-related cases; 3) produce a summary of the characteristics of defendants charged under trafficking-related statutes and the outcome of their cases; 4) estimate multinomial logit models to predict the effect of the choice of trafficking-related statute for charging defendants on the likelihood of different outcomes in trafficking cases; and 5) estimate the incidence of prostitution arrests nationwide, using multiple imputation techniques where feasible to correct for missing data in counties where reporting to the UCR is incomplete, and analyze the relationship between these arrests and federal trafficking cases. ca/ncf