Grooming Traffickers: Investigating the Techniques and Mechanisms for Seducing and Coercing New Traffickers

• NCJ Number: 309570
• Author(s): Amber Horning; Loretta Stalans
• Date Published: April 2024
• Length: 219 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2019-R2-CX-0067
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Award: Grooming Traffickers: Investigating the Techniques and Mechanisms for Seducing and Coercing New Traffickers

Annotation

In this study, researchers funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) investigated the techniques and mechanisms traffickers use in the grooming process.

Abstract

This study, funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and researched at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Loyola University Chicago, examined how sex traffickers learn how to facilitate sex work and investigating the etiology of becoming a sex trafficker or a sex market facilitator and how this knowledge is transmitted across the generations. The main findings are divided into four groups: 1) how trauma informs this social learning process, 2) how sex market facilitation is learned, 3) what management strategies, including recruitment, were learned, and 4) how social and criminal networks vary. These findings are analyzed based on participants' location and master status designations. Previous studies funded by NIJ examined "traffickers' decision-making and organizational processes"; however, much of how one becomes a sex trafficker and its processes remain unexplored. This study provides empirical data to address this critical gap in the knowledge. The goals of this study were to 1) provide an understanding of the social learning process involved in sex market facilitation, such as who passed down those skills, what is passed down, and how this impacts their recruitment and management strategies; 2) evaluate how these social learning processes vary based on participants' prior traumatic experiences and master status designations; and 3) establish how participants are socially and criminally networked and how this impacts facilitation. There have been many studies about how sex traffickers recruit sex workers. However, very few studies evaluated how sex traffickers are recruited and learn to recruit sex workers or sex trafficking victims or facilitate sex work, along with facilitation strategies, including interpersonal and economic coercion.