Human Trafficking Event 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 items to identify patterns that are actually human trafficking. Network analysis of 6 years of court data supplemented by social media data has been able to show that a select pattern in the types of non-trafficking charges brought can suggest that human and sex trafficking may be occurring in individual cases.