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Despite public attention to the problem of human trafficking, it has proven difficult to measure the problem. Improving the quality of information about human trafficking is critical to developing sound anti-trafficking policy. In support of this effort, in 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation incorporated human trafficking offenses in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Despite this achievement, there are many reasons to expect the UCR program to underreport human trafficking. Law enforcement agencies struggle to identify human trafficking and distinguishing it from other crimes. Additionally, human trafficking investigations may not be accurately classified in official data sources. Finally, human trafficking presents unique challenges to summary and incident-based crime reporting methods. For these reasons, it is important to understand how agencies identify and report human trafficking cases within the UCR program and what part of the population of human trafficking victims in a community are represented by UCR data. This study provides critical information to improve law enforcement identification and reporting of human trafficking.

Coding criminal incidents investigated as human trafficking offenses in three US cities, supplemented by interviews with law and social service stakeholders in these locations, this study answers the following research questions:

• How are human trafficking cases identified and reported by the police?
• What sources of information about human trafficking exist outside of law enforcement data?
• What is the estimated disparity between actual instances of human trafficking and the number of human trafficking offenses reported to the UCR?

Recent research has identified numerous challenges facing victims of labor trafficking in the U.S. (Owens, et al., 2014; Brennan, 2014). Most of the research on labor trafficking occurring in the U.S., however, has focused on the experiences of non-citizen and foreign national victims. There are many reasons to suspect that labor trafficking victimization occurs among U.S. citizens, although the identification of this phenomenon has been difficult. For example, the homeless and those with insecure housing, individuals with intellectual and physical disability, low-wage and transitional workers, and those working in illicit economic markets or within sexualized labor services are anticipated to be at higher risk for labor trafficking victimization.

In this exploratory mixed-methods study, the research team answered four main questions to help illuminate the phenomenon of labor trafficking of U.S. citizens.

1. What are the personal, economic, or structural vulnerabilities that put U.S. citizens at risk for labor trafficking?
2. What does labor trafficking looks like for U.S. citizens and where does it fall on a continuum of labor exploitation?
3. How are U.S. citizens recruited into, move to, experience, and escape from labor trafficking victimization?
4. How do U.S. citizen labor trafficking victims seek help or exit exploitative labor situations?

These questions were answered through surveys with individuals at high risk for labor trafficking victimization across four U.S. sites (n=240), individual interviews with a subsample of survey respondents (n=27), and interviews with service providers (n=20). The surveyed population were citizens who were born in the U.S., those who were naturalized citizens at the time of their victimization, and legal permanent residents. The sampling strategy relied on several snowball and purposive sampling techniques and were developed in partnership with social service agencies, government agencies, and community contacts with knowledge of or contact with labor trafficking in each of the sites. As such, the study was not designed to generate prevalence estimation or to claim any representativeness of labor trafficking violations among U.S. citizens.

This collection only includes the quantitative survey data. Qualitative interview data are not available.

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.

After a decade of efforts to combat human trafficking in the United States through legislation, law enforcement, victim services, and public awareness, it was critical to begin to assess what legislative, legal, and civic responses have been most effective in achieving the desired outcome of reducing opportunities and instances of human trafficking. This study began to fill gaps in the understanding of effective anti-trafficking responses by evaluating three strategic platforms to combat human trafficking in the United States.

1. Researchers examined the effectiveness of state-level human trafficking legislation.
2. Investigators described how state human trafficking laws have been used to prosecute human trafficking offenders.
3. Researchers explored public opinion on human trafficking through a nationally representative survey containing embedded experiments.

The collection includes 2 Stata data files: (1) Effective Countertrafficking Law_Legislation Dataset.dta (n=500; 32 variables) and (2) Effective Countertrafficking_State Case Data-ICPSR.dta (n=479; 109 variables). Data from the public opinion survey are not available at this time.

The Longitudinal Examination of Victimization Experiences of Latinos (LEVEL) study surveyed Latino adults from four major cities across the United States to evaluate the past-year incidence and prevalence of bias or hate motivated victimization. This study is a follow-up to the Understanding and Measuring Bias Victimization Against Latinos study, ICPSR 37598, that was conducted in 2018-2019. The hope of this follow-up study, in conjunction with the original study "Wave 1", is to provide greater context into bias victimization by breaking apart the diverse nature of Latinx communities in regards to immigration status, language use, origin, acculturation, and enculturation.