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About 40 percent of online advertisements offering escort and sex work services in British Columbia included language indicating child sex trafficking, according to a new preprint study from SFU.

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The research, the first of its kind in British Columbia, used machine learning and custom web crawlers to collect and analyze a dataset of online advertisements for escort services and sex work . It was co-authored by SFU’s International Cybercrime Research Center and Sexual Exploitation Education, a Vancouver-based agency that works to prevent human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

“This is research-based evidence and proof that human trafficking is prevalent in our province and that victims of human trafficking are bought and sold in the same industry as female workers. sex,” Tiana Sharifi, CEO of Sexual Exploitation Education, said in a statement.

The research involved training a machine learning model on “a very elaborate list of key words and phrases,” including emojis, according to Sharifi. The advertisements were collected from four of the most popular websites in Canada offering escort and sex work services.

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“Teenagers or older children are at greater risk of online recruitment, as they often have unrestricted internet access with limited parental or guardian supervision,” the report’s authors wrote. They also noted that children who are lured and cared for in British Columbia “may well be trafficked to other parts of Canada or to other countries.”

“They use the internet to meet their needs,” Sharifi said of trafficked teenagers. “The traffickers use the internet to make these false promises and provide them with these needs.”

Obtaining accurate statistics on sex trafficking is difficult, in part due to the inherently secretive nature of the problem and varying definitions from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Limited data and the fact that sex crimes are among the least likely to be reported contribute to the fact that cases of human trafficking rarely result in charges in Canada.

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In 2019, 511 incidents of human trafficking were reported, according to the report. Of these, only a third resulted in charges and even then, 89% of charges were stayed, withdrawn, dismissed or dismissed. Of the reported cases of human trafficking, 95% of the victims were women.

Sharifi warned that while it was important to understand the extent to which human trafficking occurs in the sex industry, it was important not to confuse it with consensual sex work.

“It’s very important that we don’t confuse sex work with trafficking,” she said. “Those are two different things.”

Researchers collected more than 6,000 sex work advertisements from four sites in British Columbia. Approximately 1,800 were manually categorized as containing language associated with trafficking. These 1,800 advertisements were then used to train machine learning models capable of identifying advertisements suggesting child trafficking and exploitation from the full advertisements dataset.

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Sharifi hopes to expand the research to include social media platforms, where she says the majority of initial grooming for underage sex work first occurs.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in this area, especially since the pandemic, as there has been more emphasis on using the internet to connect with others,” she said.

Sharifi said the ultimate goal of the research is to develop tools that law enforcement can use to continuously monitor internet advertisements for human tracking and sexual exploitation.

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