Mariam Jafri, Ziyun Ma, Manuela Roca, Elizabeth Rhee
Hotel and motel venues have become critical battlegrounds in the fight against human trafficking, particularly for sex trafficking. These locations are often exploited by traffickers due to their transient nature and accessibility. This project's purpose is to shed light on this pressing issue through data-driven visualizations, aiming to inform and inspire action within the hospitality industry, and use these visualizations and data analysis in order to help Mona fight against hotel negligence in respect to this problem by gathering datasets and articles. The project serves as an informative tool to highlight patterns and bring more attention to combating trafficking activities.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
Description: The graph above studies the demographics of some of the victims of sex trafficking, to study the patterns of the likelihood of being a sex trafficking victim. As shown in the graph above sex trafficking victims are usually female, and part of a minority group.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
Description: The graph shown above shows the different venues/industries in which trafficking victims are forced to work on. As seen in the graph a big porcentage of them are forced to work on the sex industry, followed by pornography and labor work.
Description: The graph above shows the distribution of types of human trafficking in the US. As seen in the graph the most common type of trafficking is sex trafficking followed by labor trafficking. The information used to create this graph was taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Description: The graph above is a further breakdown into the types of sex trafficking in the US, using the same source as the previous graph. This graph further analyzes how 50% of sex trafficking are adults used for commercial sex, followed by an alarming 41.7% of prostitution/exploitation of a child.
Source: Polaris Analysis of 2021 Data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline
Description: The graph shows the number of incidents in the locations in which human trafficking victims were recruited. The following graph allows us to compare the values of 2020 with 2021. It is easy to analyze how the greatest tool for recruiting ictims is through the internet in both 2020 and 2021, thus, making us question what regulations could be put in place to decrease the amount of incidents. It was also really interesting to see how schools, detention centers, and schools are also used for recruiting purposes and it makes our group question, how and what regulations could be put in place to deny access to criminals from preying on their victims.
Source: A Roadmap for Systems and Industries to Prevent and Disrupt Human Trafficking: Hotels and Motels
Description: Hotels are being forced into the public eye because traffickers are taking advantage of hotels to help facilitate their illicit businesses, Polaris determined that "75 percent of survivors in the Polaris survey reported coming into contact with hotels at some point during their trafficking situation". The following information is a representation of how hotels are used for sex trafficking. As visualized in the graphs above the most common use for hotels is for the action of commercial sex. Due to the ease in which customers can book a hotel room, and pay in cash, it makes it easier for these criminals to conduct their illicit business in their establishments. Another, essential use of hotels for these crimes is how criminals often use them as a place to stay during traveling, as well-known sex victims are usually taken from their homes to different locations to isolate the victim and make it harder for police and family to locate them. The graph shows other uses for hotels, some positive such as victims using them as shelters when they can exit, to some outrageous such as being trafficked by the hotel or a subcontractor of a hotel.
Description: The graph above shows the percentages of arrests for commercial sex acts divided by state. As easily seen in the graph above the state with the largest number of arrests is Nevada, followed by Georgia and Mississippi. Considering Nevada has legalized prostitution this was a great shock for our group, upon further investigation we realized that countries and states that have legalized prostitution often suffer from illegal sex trade business, according to Awaken Justice "its illegal sex trade is 63% higher than the next highest state" . Additionally, Nevada counts with Las Vegas which according to Deliverfund accounts for "more than 90% of prostitution in Nevada" and has also been called a hub for child sex trafficking.
The main goal for the project of this semester is to create visualization that supports the idea that hotels and motels are often used as venues for sex trafficking. The visualizations are meant to be able to prove that hotels should establish regulations that train workers in detecting sex trafficking and forcing them to help.
There is a lack of clear information and data on the use of hotels and venues, databases that have this information are not publicly available therefore, our goal has been divided into different tasks all with the hope to build up visualizations on these topics.
Over the semester, we searched for relevant information about child sex trafficking in hotels and made visualizations from the gathered data. Initially, we aimed to find data that are specifically about child sex trafficking in hotels, child sex trafficking, or hotel sex trafficking. Although we would find articles that include numbers, we had great difficulty tracking down the original source of the data, so after discussing with our client, we decided to shift our attention to making visualizations of the data we could find, even if they are not about the specific topics we are focusing on. Another problem we encountered was that some of the data are shown on pdfs, and copying and pasting out of them doesn't work, so we used AI to assist us transfer the pdf to usable data.
Through our continuous communication with the client, we adapted our project to fitting the available resources that we were able to find. We also shifted away from gathering relevant articles because our client decided that as CSE students, our skills are more helpful to be applied in data visualization and technological side of the project. Throughout this project, keeping an open mind and adapting to new challenges enabled us to continue making progress and better serve the client's needs.
We started this project trying to find information regarding Human Trafficking with an emphasis on the use of hotels and motels as venues for sex trafficking. Because our main goal was to create visualization, the data we were looking for were databases containing keys and values that we could later modify to make different graphs that could hopefully help us identify trends.
When we started the research, we found a lot of documents that mention the responsibilities of hotels in sex trafficking crimes however every time they used any statistics they would not say where that value was taken from or how it was calculated, it was impossible to find the underlying dataset. We looked through multiple articles - all of which made references to numbers that were simply not available to the general public, so we were forced to take a different approach to our project
We decided we would use the data available by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which only mentioned the general information about human trafficking and created impacting visualization on that information while two other team members continued the search for data. When trying to find information one person focused on making a collection of articles on sex trafficking cases and collecting the main data from each, while another team member focused on transforming already existing graphs into dictionaries or CSV with the help of AI that we could later use to create more visualizations.
The lack of publicly available information was the biggest struggle we faced during our time working on the project, as it slowed us down significantly and prevented us from truly being able to complete our main goal. In the future, we would want to expand our graphs to have more motel/hotel-specific information, from data on how often hotel employees report a case to what hotel chains are the most used for these atrocious crimes.
For the next steps of the project the idea is to continue collecting more information about the use of hotels/motels as venues for sex trafficking. We want to find information about the extent of the knowledge of workers when it comes to sex trafficking in hotels, common routes of sex trafficking and possible hotels as stops and common hotel chains used for this.
Once we have gathered more information we will continue to use that data to create visualizations that support the claim.
Our communication worked very well. We had group messages that allowed us to quickly let others know what we have done, what needs to be done, what questions we had, and any reminders of deadlines. Additionally, we were really good at separating the task between the 4 of us allowing us to cover more ground. The way we divided the task 2 of us focused on furthering the research while 2 of us focused on creating the visualizations.
Initially the best way to get started with this project is to explore the information that has been gathered. Therefore you should take a look at every document but make emphasize on following documents: