In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 7: Research on Youth Victims of Trafficking

A convo with Meredith DankFeb 01Time: 22:49

On this episode of Tell Us About It, we talk with Meredith Dank, a research professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the author of The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. Meredith worked with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, where her research included trafficking victimization.  Throughout this episode, she talks about conducting two studies on youth trafficking, including the trust-building measures taken, lessons learned from the data, and how they incorporated both researchers and practitioners into this process.

Related Links:

• Learn more about her research done with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center
• Follow Meredith Dank on Twitter

 

Transcript:

Susan Howley: Welcome to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos, a podcast from the Center for Victim Research with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On each episode of Tell Us About It, we talk to researchers and practitioners about their work, the tools being built for use in the field, and how we can work together to build an evidence base for crime victim services. I’m here with Meredith Dank, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. While with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, Meredith conducted two innovative research studies focused on youth victims of trafficking. She’s here with us today to talk about the process of interviewing those young people and the role partnerships with practitioners played and continues to play in her work. Welcome Meredith.

Meredith Dank: Thank you very much for having me.

Susan Howley: It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak with you today. You have a great reputation as a researcher in this area, working with teen victims of human trafficking, and we wanted to get your thoughts on the complexities of researching this potentially vulnerable population. To start out with, can you share a little about the research you’ve done in the area of human trafficking, the scope of the studies and a little bit about what you found?

Meredith Dank: So specific to the two studies that you had mentioned, I worked, when I was a doctoral student, on the first study at John Jay College looking specifically at the commercial sexual exploitation of children in New York City and through using an innovative at the time methodology called respondent-driven sampling, we were able to interview over 300 young people about their experiences. And based on those findings, one of the bigger findings that came out of that was that this is an extremely complex issue and it impacts young people from all genders, all sexual orientations, and all different kinds of backgrounds. And based on those findings, we were able to get additional government funding through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to focus specifically on LGBTQ youth, young men who have sex with men and young women who have sex with women, to document their specific experiences engaging in survival sex and being commercially sexually exploited.

Susan Howley: Can you tell me a little bit about that innovative research technique you mentioned? I think you said it was responsive human sampling.

Meredith Dank: It’s respondent-driven sampling and the methodology is essentially snowball sampling but definitely more systematic and you’re able to generate population estimates with the data that you collect. So with the first study, we did generate an estimate. With the second study, we didn’t use it for that purpose. But the way that it works is you find seeds, and usually that’s through very important partnerships with local community-based organizations, and these seeds are young people who are the brave souls to come forward who meet the criteria. So in this case they had to have traded sex for money, food, shelter, clothing, et cetera in New York and be between the ages of 13 to 21. And so they come in and we incentivize them for coming and being interviewed and then they can refer up to three people within their network who also meet the criteria to come in and be interviewed as well. So it kind of snowballs from there, and that’s how with the first study, we were able to get 300, and then with the second study, we were able to get also around 300.

Susan Howley: Okay. Tell me a little bit about what you found in that first study that you said led to the second study.

Meredith Dank: Again we found that the study is very much not a black and white issue. So I think that when you’re thinking of commercial sexual exploitation and/or human trafficking, people often want to couch it into this black and white issue of bad and good. But what we found, directly through the voices of the young people that we interviewed, is that how they get involved and why they may stay involved is often quite complex. So in certain cases, young people are definitely being forced by a third party exploiter but in many other cases these young people are entering into this as a means of survival. This is how they’re getting food, this is how they’re getting some form of shelter and having their basic needs met, oftentimes because their options are incredibly limited, if there are options at all to be able to make some money.

Susan Howley: If people wanted to find out more about the studies and the results that you found where could they look?

Meredith Dank: For that first study that I did when I was a doctoral student, you can go online, it’s through NCJRS, but also if you just google “commercial sexual exploitation” and my last name it usually pops up. And then the other research that I’ve done on human trafficking, including the study with LGBTQ youth, all of those reports are available for free on the Urban Institute website, which is www.urban.org.

Susan Howley: Great, thank you. Now all research involving human subjects requires procedures to obtain consent and protect the participants. What does this look like when you’re working with such a vulnerable population, these young people engaged in commercial sex trafficking? Are there special considerations or challenges in being trauma-informed and victim-centered in this context?

Meredith Dank: I think with doing research around human subjects you have to take in a lot of considerations. But I think specifically for a population like this, there are additional considerations that you need to work out. So for example, I think confidentiality is extremely important for this population. They’re incredibly vulnerable. Oftentimes, I’ve had experiences and run-ins with law enforcement and the child welfare system. So in order for them to feel comfortable talking to you, you have to ensure that whatever is discussed will remain confidential and will not be tied back to them in any way. So obviously also making sure that it remains anonymous is important as well, so no names are recorded. If other names of individuals in their lives are discussed, then obviously telling them that that information will be redacted from any transcripts and certainly won’t show up in any final deliverables is incredibly important. So I think creating a safe space and trying to establish that trust from the very beginning is paramount to making this kind of research work. And if they feel that you’re sincere and that this is indeed a safe space in which they can talk about these oftentimes incredibly traumatizing experiences, then of course they will hopefully open up to you. In addition to that, given the level of trauma and PTSD that many of them have experienced over time, also making sure that the research staff is trained on how to spot indicators of trauma, particularly acute trauma, that might be happening at the time of the interview so that either a break can be given to the interviewee and/or the interview can be stopped. So I think that there’s additional training that I think is incredibly important to be able to do this type of research in an ethical way.

Susan Howley: So what steps did you take to try to build this trust and lay the groundwork for the interviews in your outreach phase or your recruitment phase?

Meredith Dank: One of the first things that I did, particularly for the second study I learned some lessons with the first one and one of those big lessons was really it’s important to have your interviewers reflect those that you’re interviewing. So for the LGBTQ study I went and hired and trained a handful of young people who were LGBTQ-identified and in some cases had engaged in trading sex for survival themselves and/or had a large network of friends who did do that. And I think that this was able to establish, again, a sense of trust and safety for the young people we were hoping to interview because they saw themselves oftentimes reflected in the interviewers. And so there was a sense of these people get me, I can open up about these experiences without feeling judged or stigmatized in some way.

Susan Howley: That sounds like a very thoughtful strategy. But when you are using interviewers or researchers from this same population, are there special trauma-centric practices that you need to have in place for the interviewers themselves?

Meredith Dank: Absolutely. I think vicarious trauma is an issue that is not often discussed or researched itself when it comes to researchers. And I think that obviously it was a huge plus for us to train these young people to conduct the interviews, but I think that, given their own maybe trauma that they’ve been dealing with over time, hearing these traumatic stories can be incredibly triggering to them as well. So making sure that there are regular – and by regular, at minimum weekly check-ins and supervision check-ins, whether it be as a group or individually, is incredibly important for the mental health of the interviewers as well. Making sure that they are able to process some of the stuff that they’re hearing in a positive or okay way and then intervening if they are not able to do that.

Susan Howley: Do you have any information from these young interviewers about the impact of the project? Did they find it overall empowering or more traumatic?

Meredith Dank: I absolutely think it was definitely more of an empowering experience. I think being able to work on a study like this, they understood the importance, hey understood that it could have an incredible amount of impact on the lives of these young people by hopefully improving programs that are out there and policies around you know getting these young people assistance. So despite maybe some of the triggering and other negative consequences of doing research like this, I think it was definitely more of an empowering experience for them.

Susan Howley: So I know the process of conducting this research was a long road and it required building a lot of relationships with practitioners and then reaching out to this research subject pool. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of finding the people to interview?

Meredith Dank: Sure. Going back to what I had said earlier about establishing really good partnerships with local community-based organizations can make or break your project when you do something like this. So that does require quite a bit of trust-building. A lot of these organizations that are working with this vulnerable population, which is oftentimes runaway and homeless youth and/or specific to trafficked youth, are going to have probably more questions for you than you will have for them as to what your intentions are. They oftentimes feel that they are in some ways the gatekeepers and trying to protect the young people that they’re serving and obviously don’t want to be triggering them or re-traumatizing them in certain ways. So I think making sure that any researcher who’s doing a study like this builds in that time to build those relationships with the community-based organizations is incredibly important because they’re the ones who are going to be able to identify those initial young people for you to interview.

Susan Howley: Can you tell us more about the role that these practitioners played throughout your research process, at the recruitment stage, the interview stage, maybe interpreting findings? How were practitioners engaged?

Meredith Dank: So with the second study, the LGBTQ study, we actually partnered with a local community-based organization, Streetwise and Safe. So they were are our partners throughout the entire study. And so that’s how we were able to recruit the young people to train as interviewers, was through their peer leadership program. But then, the additional community-based organizations in the New York City area, in some cases we had them review our interview protocols to provide feedback, they helped us identify young people for us to pilot our protocols on to make sure that the wording and the questions were appropriate and sensitive to them. And then, as far as the recruitment goes and continuing that relationship, we did occasionally have to go back to them to help us identify additional young people, just keeping them abreast of how the study is going, what the findings are. And then during either the writing stage or even after they’re written, making sure that you’re briefing them, maybe before releasing all the findings about what you found is also a way to kind of keep them engaged and making sure that if they do have some important feedback that that’s incorporated before the findings are released.

Susan Howley: So given all your experience, and particularly the way you just talked about keeping those practitioners engaged, I’d love to focus on a few key takeaways and pieces of advice. I know sometimes practitioners have bad experiences working with researchers. How can practitioners make sure that the researchers that are interested in working with them will take the right approach?

Meredith Dank: I think that, on the side of practitioners, is to make sure that you are also vetting the researchers. Both sides are probably going to be vetting each other, but the practitioners making sure that you are questioning the researchers around their ethical procedures or ethical considerations. What they plan to do as far as how they plan on recruiting, what kind of information is included in the consent form, particularly around confidentiality, privacy, and making sure that the young people understand that they can stop the interview or survey at any time or skip certain questions, that sort of thing. So really questioning how this information is being communicated to that young person. And also if I were a practitioner, I would really want to make sure that the researchers are able to provide some sort of resource at the end of any interaction with a young person, whether they decide to participate in the interview or not, but a resource list with organizations in the neighborhood where they can seek additional help, whether it be counseling or food or housing or that sort of thing. And also I think incentives are a big part in making sure that you are compensating the young people for their time, for meeting with you I think is also something that practitioners should be asking about. So incentives is another key piece to ensuring that this kind of research works and is successful. And practitioners – that’s one of the first questions that I often get is you know are you able to monetarily compensate these young people for their time. And I think it’s a big part in being able to get people to participate, but also I think, from a practitioner standpoint, they want to make sure that we are taking this seriously and we understand that a young person is taking time out of their schedule to meet with us and is compensated for that.

Susan Howley: So you were both showing that you valued the interviewees’ time and you were leaving them with something positive with the resource list.

Meredith Dank: Correct.

Susan Howley: So you talked about needing a two-way vetting process. What researchers look for when they’re looking for a practitioner partner?

Meredith Dank: I believe that researchers should make sure that, first of all, at least some of the practitioners that they’re partnering with are staffed in a way that they can provide some immediate services to the young people that you may be interviewing, who might need some immediate counselling or some immediate sort of intervention. I don’t think you can require all practitioners to be able to provide that, but making sure you have a good balance is incredibly important. I also think that if you do partner with certain practitioners, making sure that they are fully committed to seeing the research through. That they understand the importance of the research, that they understand that in order to complete the research they need to provide X, Y, and Z, whether that be identifying and recruiting young people for the study or in some cases even some data collection. And it’s obviously really important that they see whatever they agree to do all the way through because again they’re such an important part to the study and so having that strong partnership and researchers being able to rely on those practitioners to deliver is incredibly important.

Susan Howley: So are there any steps that researchers or practitioners should take during this process to make sure that the relationship stays strong and collaborative?

Meredith Dank: Again I think making sure that they remain engaged, so frequent check-ins with them, I mean as frequent as they would want. But I think keeping them abreast on how the study is going if there is anything incredibly important you’re learning that could be useful to them and their programming or the way that they’re structuring their organization, providing that feedback loop is really important to keeping that collaboration really strong. And just making sure that they’re also part of the dissemination as well. I think that having the practitioner voice when you are disseminating the findings is incredibly important, especially when you’re doing applied research that you’re hoping impacts policy in addition to how programs are operated. Having that practitioner buy-in and being able to support what you’ve learned and figure out ways and recommendations and how to maybe implement change is really important. And so I think just keeping them engaged throughout the course of the research, which can be sometimes hard, but I think it’s important to make that time to do that.

Susan Howley: So I like to ask this of all our guests: what do you envision for this area of research, human trafficking of a minor victim, maybe five years from now? What additional research should we be looking to build in this area?

Meredith Dank: I think there’s still a huge gap when it comes to prevention. We do a lot around intervention, trying to figure out ways in which to help those young people who might already be involved in this. And we still have a long way to go there, particularly around evaluating the programs and assistance that’s out there currently. We don’t have a good sense of exactly what works well. But I think where we’re really lacking is how we prevent young people from ever being put in a situation where they’re either being recruited or forced into choosing this as an option given limited other options. I think that we really need to do a better job in figuring out ways in which we can just prevent this all from happening to begin with.

Susan Howley: That’s a wonderful thought to leave our audience with. Meredith, thank you so much for your time today and for all the lessons you’ve been able to share with our audience. I really appreciate your expertise and your willingness to educate the rest of us.

Meredith Dank: Thank you.