An analysis of the relationship between knowledge of sex trafficking and perceptions of law enforcement officers when identifying victims

The human trafficking industry has become one of the largest and most profitable industries worldwide. Sex trafficking victims are forced into exploitative conditions including being required to break laws to benefit their captors. Law enforcement officers are trained to apprehend criminals for the public good. For these reasons, law enforcement officers may tend to view a victim as a criminal if trafficked individuals are breaking the law, such as in prostitution. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand if the knowledge about trafficking and beliefs about prostitution predict whether an officer perceives a person as a victim or a criminal in an ambiguous prostitution-based situation. This study hypothesizes that the amount of time on the police force and training in trafficking are predictive. This study followed a correlational research design, using Pearson's R Correlations and a Multiple regression to determine predictive ability of the four variables, knowledge, training, beliefs, and time on the force. The criterion variable is the respondent's choice of criminal or victim (i.e. perception) in response to a vignette. The goal of this study is to find information that may be used to decriminalize victims and provide victims with appropriate assistance.;Results found a significant relationship between total knowledge in human trafficking and victim identification in the victim vignette. A significant relationship was also found between total training in human trafficking and victim identification in the ambiguous vignette. Training and knowledge were found to be predictive of victim identification (i.e. perceptions).