WU researchers to map out human trafficking patterns in St. Louis

Rory Mather | Contributing Reporter

The Washington University School of Medicine and Brown School of Social Work have come together in a joint effort to map out the different factors of human trafficking across St. Louis.

Psychiatry professor Rumi Price and McDonnell scholar Paul Boonmak display preliminary data on their human trafficking study in the St. Louis region.Skyler Kessler | Student Life

Psychiatry professor Rumi Price and McDonnell scholar Paul Boonmak display preliminary data on their human trafficking study in the St. Louis region.

Human trafficking, a multi-billion-dollar industry, is the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise. Recently the federal government listed St. Louis among the top human trafficking jurisdictions, but officials have yet to find a way to quantify or visualize the extent of the problem in different areas of the city.

The project aims to create a map that uses an interdisciplinary approach to determine areas with the highest prevalence of human trafficking.

As part of her master’s thesis at the University of Missouri—Columbia, Amanda Colegrove, director of the Crime Victim Advocacy Center’s Coalition Against Trafficking and Exploitation (CATE), thought about taking what researchers consider as risk factors for human trafficking and applying them to the landscape of St. Louis.

“You can’t get hard data with numbers. You have to come at it with a different angle,” Colegrove said.

With a seed fund from the University’s Institute of Public Health, the Washington University team and CATE began a series of studies to create more comprehensive maps that focused on specific risk factors across St. Louis.

This study currently consists of three main perspectives: pinpointing the potential venues of human trafficking, researching various weak institutions and mapping out the demographic risk factors encompassing the St. Louis Metropolitan Area.

Researchers have found that race and socioeconomic status can play a role in the likelihood of someone engaging in human trafficking. The last perspective creates a map that helps to visualize these trends in demographics throughout different St. Louis districts.

The final goal of the study is to combine the three maps into one, multi-layered version. By finding areas of overlap, the team can deduce where human trafficking is concentrated throughout St. Louis and where they should focus their outreach projects.

A way that the team plans on validating their findings is by collecting the locations of federally-prosecuted cases of human trafficking in St. Louis. By comparing the demographics of the victims with those of the map, the team can see if there are any real-life correlations.

One of the biggest obstacles that survivors of human trafficking face is the lack of housing, a topic which has caused numerous debates in CATE.

“We use this research to increase awareness, but we have nowhere to put them. How much awareness do we want to raise if we have nowhere to put them?” Colegrove said.

Rumi Kato Price, a professor of psychiatry, said that shelters require so much funding and are so regulated that they cannot meet the fluctuating and real-time problem.

Price wants to combat this problem with a project she calls UberHouse. Based on the successful structure of companies such as Uber and Airbnb, UberHouse would connect survivors of human trafficking to willing “donors” of unused rooms in their properties until survivors can find more permanent housing.

Much of the research and foundations for UberHouse are still in their infant stages. With only a small group of people working on the project and an even smaller budget, getting the project up and running is a large task.

The team is open to all undergraduates who are interested in taking part in the series of research and social engineering projects, whether it be creating the website, creating an app, helping to develop screening and monitoring methods or creating the structure for the UberHouse.

“There is still a lot of groundwork to be done and there is not much in place to move that forward yet,” Colegrove said.

When it comes to the everyday student who does not necessarily have the time to donate, the team says that simply spreading awareness of human trafficking and political activism will help push the movement forward.

“Getting politically active is crucial,” Colegrove said. “We need social services to provide that net for women, girls and boys who have no other options and then get lured into the trap of human trafficking.”

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