With additional reporting from Beth Wheaton-Páramo, Ph.D.
In response to the need for access to data on human trafficking and prostitution arrests, SMU created a dashboard for researchers across the nation to gather preliminary findings about human trafficking and prostitution in the U.S. through insights from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
With mutually beneficial data-sharing agreements in place, SMU works with owners/holders of human trafficking data to help them enhance their data useability and effectiveness. The SMU Data Warehouse allows holders of human trafficking data to securely upload data into the data warehouse. This data may be current or historical data from a variety of database formats. Within the data warehouse, processes are run to improve the data, such as filling in the gaps when data is incomplete.
Credentialed users can filter incidents of human trafficking and prostitution by county, reporting agency, year, and offense type to view information about the victims, offenses, offenders, and arrestees. The data ranges from 2013-2022 and includes demographics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, and relationships between individuals.
Mateo Langston Smith at SMU creates custom dashboards for researchers to view data that lies in the SMU Human Trafficking Data Warehouse as part of research led by Elizabeth Wheaton-Páramo, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor/Economics Senior Lecturer (htdr@smu.edu). Mateo reports: “By developing custom dashboards for researchers, SMU is helping to close the enormous gap that is data access for researchers. Historically, human trafficking data is siloed in different locations, and a researcher has to spend the majority of their time and resources to gain access to the raw, unstructured, and messy data. Our team at SMU does the heavy lifting to make the data accessible by cleaning, structuring, securing, and visualizing the relevant data to a particular research question or topic.”
If you have data that could benefit from these structuring and visualization services, we invite you to start a conversation with us!
