Grooming Traffickers: Investigating the Techniques and Mechanisms for Seducing and Coercing New Traffickers, New York City, New York, Chicago, Illinois, 2021-2022 (ICPSR 39120)
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. This study aimed to close the gap in the literature by investigating the etiology of becoming a sex trafficker or a sex market facilitator and how this knowledge is transmitted across the generations.
This mixed methods study used Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) to recruit and survey sex traffickers in New York City and Chicago. Both cities have a long history of many types of sex market facilitation, ranging from ancillary roles in sex market facilitation up to sex trafficking. Qualitative data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 183 sex market facilitators (New York City (n=84) and Chicago (n=99)) about facilitators' social learning processes and social and criminal networks. Additionally, this study collected rich qualitative narratives, revealing how facilitators perceived themselves, their self-identities, and their roles as mentors. These data were recorded, stored securely, and later coded by researchers into a quantitative dataset deposited with ICPSR. This quantitative dataset captures facilitator/trafficker demographic characteristics and includes variables describing how sex traffickers are groomed or mentored to be traffickers, how they groom new traffickers, and how they interact and network socially with other traffickers and sex workers. The aforementioned qualitative data are not included in this release.