Professor analyzes anti-human-trafficking movement
Associate Professor Kirsten Foot hopes her latest research will help prevent and abolish human trafficking through a two-pronged study: by mapping the anti-trafficking activities of hundreds of organizations representing multiple sectors, and by analyzing multi-sector collaboration.
Foot, Associate Professor in Communication and Adjunct Faculty in the Information School, has studied online organizing and networks for 15 years. As co-director of the WebArchivist.org research group, she develops methods and tools for studying social and political action on the Web over time. Her studies include the production of electoral Web spheres around the world, the development of ethnic conflict monitoring networks, the fair-trade movement in the U.S. and the U.K., and, most recently, the anti-human-trafficking movement.
Her interest in human trafficking began in 2007 when she realized that the efforts of the anti-human-trafficking movement were continuously undercut because of a lack of cooperation and understanding. “Collaboration between sectors is always a challenge,” Foot said. “But in the human-trafficking arena, in many ways it is the perfect storm. It’s one of these areas of social problems that absolutely demands multi-sector, multi-level collaboration for anything effective to be done.”
Human trafficking is a global issue, with 29.2 million slaves working today, according to seattleagainstslavery.org. These people are brought into the system in many ways, and are forced to work in various roles; whether as bonded labor (64 percent), forced labor (27 percent), or as trafficked slaves (9 percent). Kathleen Morris, program manager for the Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network (WARN), told KUOW that labor trafficking is more prevalent than sex trafficking, and that Washington state is a “hotspot” for trafficking activity. Slaves are easily brought into the country via our international border and port, and many of those trafficked into our state are put to work in Eastern Washington’s agricultural industry.
This crime against humanity had flown under the radar in Washington state until 2003, when Velma Veloria, now former Washington State Representative of Seattle’s 11th District, succeeded in passing the first bill in the country making human trafficking a crime at the state level. Today, governmental and nongovernmental actors, healthcare providers, federal detectives and state-level law enforcement are all coming together in the anti-human-trafficking movement. With so many sectors involved, however, it is difficult for everyone to agree on how to carry out the actions to prevent and combat this crime.
“Nationally, law enforcement is concerned about victims, but wants to make sure the traffickers get arrested, while the victim-service organizations want to be sure that the victims feel safe and cared for, and the prosecutors want to bring about justice for the victims by getting traffickers convicted and sentenced appropriately,” Foot said. “Parts of each sectors’ aims overlap, but the differences between their aims can lead to challenges in trusting each other, and in feeling confident in what actors from another sector are going to do in any particular situation.”
Foot saw the opportunity of contributing toward solving this problem by studying the communication and organizing practices of multi-sector coalitions. For the past six months, Foot has been analyzing what it takes to build and sustain robust collaboration that will result in the success of anti-trafficking work, despite the challenges. Currently, Foot is reviewing data from her observations of interactions in multi-sector meetings and interviews she conducted with different representatives of each sector in order to draw some analytical understandings of collaboration attempts. “Everyone acknowledges that anti-trafficking efforts should be coordinated, and that it’s really difficult. I’m trying to unpack what it takes to sustain collaboration despite the inevitable challenges,” said Foot.
In the other prong of Foot’s research, she takes a digital perspective, by analyzing which kinds of anti-trafficking activities are engaged by which kinds of actors worldwide. Each year for the past three years, Foot has conducted a macro-scale survey of anti-human-trafficking efforts as they are reported on the Web. Working with graduate and undergraduate students in the Communication Department, she has been collecting a structured set of observations detailing different aspects of anti-trafficking efforts from hundreds of online actors.
Her research team has identified the major activities of these actors: raising awareness, enforcement of laws, equipping, intervention, policy work, prevention, rehabilitation of victims, and research on the problem of human trafficking. Tracking these actions by analyzing texts and hyperlinks on the websites reveals the geographical and operational links between the actors across the world. With these links, Foot is able to measure the prevalence (the breadth of activity) and robustness (the depth) of these activities in every region of the world. “The patterns of hyperlink networks between groups of actors within the same kind of issue arena are one way of analyzing relations between them,” Foot said, “and then looking at the relationship between that and what they say on their website that they’re doing on the ground provides another lens for understanding how the anti-human-trafficking movement is developing.”
Foot says her research will continue over the next year. In the meantime she is working on a book proposal based on her preliminary analyses of the participant-observation data and the Web-based data. Pieces of her work will be published over the course of next year, including a chapter in an edited volume on the dark side of globalization, forthcoming from the United Nations Press. She intends to publish a book detailing the full scope of her research in a couple years.
For more information on the problem of human trafficking in Washington and local anti-human-trafficking efforts, Foot recommends:
-By Amanda Weber
