Presentation description

Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Every year, millions of women, children, and men are trafficked worldwide. When survivors enter a recovery and reintegration process, housing is a top priority for these individuals. Unfortunately, little is known about the effectiveness of current housing services and how they affect survivors. The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to identify the most effective practices for housing survivors of human trafficking in the U.S. The first step of the research was stakeholder mapping, which helped identify organizations across the United States that offer housing for survivors. This involved searching through each state to find organizations that provided housing to human trafficking survivors. We identified 422 organizations through a variety of search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Then, a "heat map" was created to show the saturation of housing services throughout different states. This showed that the western coast (Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada) had much higher saturation than the rest of the country. Utah was the least saturated in the U.S. with only one organization offering housing for human trafficking survivors. Out of the screened housing organizations, 74.21% offered emergency housing, 18.20% provided transitional housing, 4.50% offered residential, 2.71% offered short-term housing, and 1.36% provided long-term housing. This research is crucial for researchers and organizations to implement strategies that will help survivors of human trafficking. While long-term housing is the least common form of housing offered in this sample, the literature suggests that long-term housing is the most successful type of housing for human trafficking survivors. Future research is needed on causal factors related to housing programming availability, as well as the effectiveness of various housing types for human trafficking survivors.