Identifying human trafcking indicators in the UK online sex market

This study identifes the presence of human trafcking indicators in a UK-based sample of sex workers who advertise their services online. To this end, we developed a crawling and scraping software that enabled the collection of information from 17, 362 advertisements for female sex workers posted on the largest dedicated platform for sex work services in the UK. We then established a set of 10 indicators of human trafcking and a transparent and replicable methodology through which to detect their presence in our sample. Most of the advertisements (58.3%) contained only one indicator, while 3,694 of the advertisements (21.3%) presented 2 indicators of human trafcking. Only 1.7% of the advertisements reported three or more indicators, while there were no advertisements that featured more than four. 3, 255 advertisements (19.0%) did not contain any indicators of human trafcking. Based on this analysis, we propose that this approach constitutes an efective screening process for quickly identifying suspicious cases, which can then be examined by more comprehensive and accurate tools to identify if human trafcking is occurring. We conclude by calling for more empirical research into human trafcking indicators