Amy Farrell

Amy Farrell, director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, told Newsweek that neither Republican nor Democratic policies are “particularly effective as anti-trafficking efforts.”

Commenting on the data, Northeastern University Professor Amy Farrell told Newsweek, “Overall, we know human trafficking is under identified, under investigated and under prosecuted and some places around the country are better at identifying, investigating and prosecuting.”

While there is debate about whether arresting buyers cuts down on the exploitative sex trade, “not arresting them at all completely sanctions their behavior,” said Amy Farrell, the director of Northeastern University’s School of Criminology & Criminal Justice. “It’s not fair to arrest sellers but not buyers.”

Amy Farrell, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, said if regulators spent more time listening to workers and focusing on lower-level crimes, they could stop exploitation before it develops into trafficking.

Amy Farrell, co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Lab at Northeastern University, has studied the flaws in the FBI data-collection system on human trafficking. State and local officials often misclassify trafficking cases, leading to chronic underreporting.

The study, which is the first to explore and focus on labor trafficking victimization among U.S. citizens, was conducted by researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Other advocates say that further law enforcement intervention would do more harm, pointing to past efforts to police brothels that generally end with women — usually, women of color — in jail cells. Amy Farrell, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, says society would be better served targeting the […]

“Police officers and jurors and judges don’t come from Mars,” said Amy Farrell, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University who co-authored the study. “The dominant American model of sex trafficking is coming from the movie ‘Taken.’ It isn’t surprising that’s the schema people are walking around with.” 

“This is a situation where law enforcement has egg all over their face. Somebody’s got to go down for this. And it’s going to be the women,” said Amy Farrell, a criminologist who studies sex trafficking at Northeastern University. “That’s what happens in these cases. There’s a huge political pressure to prosecute somebody and at […]

Farrell, the Northeastern criminologist, says a key need is to train and motivate other government agencies – like licensing and inspection officials who visit farms or restaurants – so they can give more tips to law enforcement. “Labor trafficking cases are so hard to see in many ways, that it really takes people being trained […]