Analysis of Human Trafficking in North Carolina Based on Criminal Records: A Framework to Measure Human Trafficking Trends

The application of quantitative analytics to human trafficking is growing rapidly, which offers novel approaches to studying a topic in which accessing reliable large-scale data is difficult. Human trafficking research often relies on proxy evidence, such as data from online advertisements. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for discerning the scale of trafficking activity. We develop a measure by applying network analysis to six years of North Carolina court data. In conjunction with existing measures, this measure could potentially produce a more accurate estimate of the amount of human trafficking encountered by the state's justice system. We further identify a series of non-trafficking criminal charges that can be highly indicative of human trafficking.