Human Trafficking: Court Case Relationships

Human trafficking is a crime that is difficult to spot and prosecute. It is not always obvious that in addition to one crime (e.g., child labor) that a larger network is in place to traffic the people actually committing a crime. UNC Charlotte data science faculty have been worked to identity relationships between seemingly unrelated crimes to identify patterns that are actually human trafficking. Network analysis of 6 years of court data has resulted in measures of the scale of human and sex trafficking occurring in the North Carolina court system and has shown that there may be significantly more trafficking than law enforcement had realized.