U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Quantifying the relationship between large public events and escort advertising behavior

NCJ Number
306185
Journal
Journal of Human Trafficking Volume: 5 Issue: 3 Dated: March 2019 Pages: 220-237
Author(s)
Benedikt Boecking; Kyle Miller; Emily Kennedy ; Artur Dubrawski1
Date Published
March 2019
Length
18 pages
Annotation

The authors studied online escort advertisement responses to large scale public events using a time series anomaly detection framework.

Abstract

They analyzed advertisement volume, approximations of advertiser volumes, and further devised a measure for movement derived from the spatio-temporal behavior amongst related advertisements. The authors’ results imply that a variety of events correlate with unusual increases in sex worker activity, including an influx of providers that are new to the respective event location. The findings indicate that there are strong market responses to some public events and that Super Bowl events which received heightened attention by authorities and news media due to a perceived link to human trafficking for sexual exploitation do not stand out amongst these events in the effect on the market that was measured.  (Published abstract provided)