January is national anti-human trafficking month. It’s a campaign to focus on the billion dollar industry that deceives or forces people into being victims of sex or labor trafficking. The National Human Trafficking Hotline says it received over two hundred calls for help in Alabama in 2023. The group says thirty-three of those callers were victims in this crime involving sex for money. Researchers at the University of Alabama in Birmingham are working at improving how trafficking can be tracked down on the internet.
APR reported back in 2019 on how trafficking is a business and businesses like to advertise. A UAB computer forensics team identified 641,000 internet ads in Alabama in 2017 that offered sex for sale. The difficulty is separating those selling sex for money or the thrill from those being trafficked against their will. The West Alabama Human Trafficking Task Force said in 2018 that 75% of the people they arrested in sting operations showed signs of being trafficked. If that observation holds true, then close to 500,000 of those ads involved trafficking.
UAB Masters degree student Libby Hill, and a group of colleagues, published research in 2024 meant to improve the way traffickers can be tracked as they go about their illegal business on the web. The group published its findings on using phrases or slang terms traffickers use to hide their illegal business when they’re online. Hill says certain words stand out…
“When traffickers are advertising to interested parties, people looking to buy sex, what sort of what slang terms, what euphemisms are being used to kind of evade law enforcement, evade the algorithm. So that's kind of what those keyword searches were looking for,” she said.
Hill contends that if a trafficking or a buyer of sexual service came out and said what they were doing, it would trigger algorithms used by law enforcement to root out the illegal business of selling human beings for sex. Hill’s team contends that computer programs can spot certain patterns in writing on the internet, but frequently it takes trained to spot slang terms that communicate between traffickers and “Johns” (buyers of sexual services.” Hill says
“So in the in the paper, we have a list of terms like Lolita or petite or tiny that don't explicitly say what it is. But sort of, if you know, you know, and the sort of people who are looking for minors on the internet know to use those terms, because they might not flag on any sort of automated thing, but the people involved in that illegal activity know that that's a euphemism.”
The State of Alabama just enacted what its calling the toughest law on the books to fight this crime. The measure makes trafficking an underage minor punishable by life in prison. The U.S. State Department invited the APR news team to address a foreign delegation of prosecutors and human rights activists on its human trafficking coverage. You listen to that coverage again at apr.org.
