Planning: CRISES: Human-Centered Action Research to Disrupt Trafficking (HART)

Human trafficking is a human rights abuse that negatively affects individuals, families and communities worldwide, including within the United States. Yet, despite continued efforts by researchers and practitioners in the field, there remain substantial gaps in knowledge on how to effectively prevent, disrupt, and dismantle human trafficking and remediate the harms human trafficking causes. What the field needs is large-scale and nuanced research on the interconnections between individuals, trafficking operations, the wide range of commercial sex market segments, community contexts, and root causes. This planning grant brings together a diverse group, including researchers from multiple disciplines, human trafficking survivor-leaders, and other stakeholders (e.g., service providers and law enforcement), to develop a national-level action research center and build a transdisciplinary team capable of carrying out this long-term research agenda. Participants will co-create a plan for building, organizing, and sustaining a new research center called “Human-Centered Action Research to Disrupt Trafficking (HART).” The planning approach for the HART Center uses a novel scientific approach to design a research agenda by converging social sciences, health sciences, and computational modeling with lived expertise from survivors of trafficking and other key stakeholders. The transdisciplinary team has a national scope with expertise to capture the realities and nuances of a broad range of trafficking contexts ethically and accurately and to translate that research to practice. This deep collaboration provides a realistic ground-truth for the direction and scale of research questions. It also enables identification and avoidance of unintended negative consequences that too often arise from human trafficking research and prevention and intervention efforts. Harms to avoid include, among other things, re-traumatizing survivors through invasive research surveys and interviews, over-focusing on some contexts leading to skewed results, inadvertently arresting victims in law enforcement interventions, and wasting resources on well-meaning, but ultimately ineffective strategies. The planning approach equalizes the playing field among participants with a carefully managed process that attends to power differentials, builds trust, and fosters shared understanding among people with diverse experience and perspectives. Methods for planning use cutting-edge strategies for team building, appreciative inquiry, and participatory collaboration through a series of interactive remote meetings culminating in an in-person convening. The results of the planning process are threefold: 1) develop shared values and research philosophy for the HART center; 2) identify key human trafficking research thrusts; and 3) build a team and project plan to address these thrusts that focus on the complex social, legal, economic, and human rights challenges of human trafficking. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.