Donna M Hughes

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Chair at University of Rhode Island

A group of hidden victims of prostitution has been brought to light by Ingeborg Kraus, a trauma therapist in Germany, and Andrea Heinz, a woman with experience in the sex trade in Canada. Dignity has published four articles by these two writers in the last year. Their nascent body of work is uncovering important new information and perspectives on...

Identifying victims of sex trafficking can be challenging for law enforcement. To determine how victims were identified in cases of sex trafficking that resulted in criminal charges, this study analyzed the records from prosecuted cases of sex trafficking to determine how the victims were identified. The analysis used primary documents, including p...

Since the Korean War and permanent stationing of U.S. troops in the Republic of Korea (ROK), U.S. servicemen stationed in the ROK have purchased sex from women trafficked domestically and across international borders to work in bars and clubs surrounding U.S. military bases. For decades, the Department of Defense (DoD) and United States Forces Kore...

This article is an analysis of law enforcement identified cases of human trafficking in Rhode Island from 2009 to 2013. Information was collected from police and court records, prosecutors’ press releases, and reports in the media. During this period, there was one case of forced labor of a domestic worker and six cases of domestic sex trafficking....

Less is known about perpetrators of sex trafficking compared to the victims. The aim of this study is to learn more about sex traffickers by analyzing the criminal backgrounds of offenders arrested for sex trafficking crimes. Between 2009 and 2015, there were 22 cases of sex trafficking involving 38 traffickers in Rhode Island. Criminal background...

Please join a professional global community in the creation of a new online, open­access, peer­reviewed scholarly journal on sexual exploitation. As we know, sexual exploitation is a harmful global phenomenon, a human rights violation, and a gender crime that affects millions of women, girls, boys, and men, around the world. The resulting trauma ca...

This presentation is a case study of challenges to investigating sex trafficking created by decriminalized prostitution. For 29 years (from 1980 to 2009) in Rhode Island, engaging in prostitution was not prohibited or regulated. Commercial sex acts were private and beyond the interest of the state. Lack of laws or regulations of prostitution create...

Present an analysis of seven state and federal cases of human trafficking, including forced labor and sex trafficking, in Rhode Island from 2009 until 2013. In 2009, Rhode Island passed a comprehensive human trafficking law. Since then there have been six cases of sex trafficking and one case of forced labor. Sources for information on the human tr...

In this article, the intersection of gender, trafficking for sexual exploitation, and use of digital communication technologies are analyzed based on data from the European Union (EU). Over the past two decades, an increase in trafficking in human beings in the EU has been accompanied by an increase in the development and availability of digital co...

This article reports a piece of original research into the links between the trafficking in women and children across the globe and how such trafficking practices have been facilitated by developments in technology and telecommunications. The connections between prostitution in the Mekong Sub-Region, pornography on the Internet, and sex tourism hav...

The trafficking of women has been a lucrative moneymaker for transnational organized crime networks, ranking third, behind drugs and arms, in criminal earnings. The U.S. military bases in South Korea were found to form a hub for the transnational trafficking of women from the Asia Pacific and Eurasia to South Korea and the United States. This study...

Each year, tens of thousands of women leave the former Soviet Union by accepting risky offers of employment and marriage in the hope of finding a better life. Many of these women become victims of violence, sexual exploitation, and trafficking. ‘Marriage agencies’ play a role in recruiting women and connecting them with foreign men. Information on...

Over the past decade, most of the analyses of the causes of sex trafficking have focused on factors in the sending countries. And efforts to combat trafficking have aimed to stop trafficking on the supply side through education and prevention campaigns in sending countries to alert people about the phenomenon of trafficking. Potential victims are w...

The technological innovations and unregulated use of the Internet have created a global medium for men's sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children. The sex industry has aggressively adopted every new information technology to increase men's sexual access to women and children. A mutually beneficial relationship exists between the Internet...

Presentation at conference: "Protecting Our Children: Working Together to End Child Prostitution," U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Washington, D.C.,13-14 December 2002

Report on research as part of U.S. Ukraine Research Partnership, the International Center of the U.S. National Institute of Justice and the Ukrainian Academy of Legal Sciences

Throughout the 1990s, tens of thousands of Ukrainian women were trafficked into prostitution. This phenomenon was researched by collecting data through interviews and surveys in Ukraine, media reports, governmental and non-governmental (NGO) reports on trafficking, and participant observation in conferences. Trafficking occurs because of a transnat...

Photo source: PhotoDisc T rafficking in women and girls for the purpose of sex-ual exploitation is a shadow market valued at US $7 billion annually. Women are trafficked to, from, and through every region in the world. This highly profitable trade poses a relatively low risk compared with trades in drugs or arms. The moneymakers are transnational n...

The author argues that the expansion of the global sex industry, especially on the Internet, has intensified the harm to the victims, and normalized and globalized the victimization and exploitation. Two components of globalization, rapid development and deployment of information technology and the industrialized commodification of women and childr...

In the milieu of political and economic restructuring known as globalization, women and children are increasingly becoming commodities to be bought, sold and consumed by tourists, military personnel, organized crime rings, and men seeking sexual entertainment or non-threatening marriage partners. Those with power are using new information technolog...

PIP The findings of a study conducted on violence against women by the staff at the SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence in Belgrade, Serbia, is reported in this paper. For each call reporting an incident of violence, a data form was completed with the details of the call. Findings revealed that almost all callers were victims of...

On 10 December 1993, International Human Rights Day, the Autonomous Women's Centre Against Sexual Violence opened in Belgrade, Serbia). Plans for the Centre started in 1992 when women from the Belgrade SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence formed The Group for Women Raped in War. The women at the Centre want to organise and respond...

Because of its unregulated nature, the Internet has become a site of sexual exploitation and global trafficking in women. DONNA HUGHES explores the promotion of sex tourism in this fast-growing medium

"They have been ceaselessly killing, torturing and raping for a year and a half already. They have banished more than three million lives. They manipulate women. Blackmail men. They spread hate, destruction and death; we are left without words to express our horror and anger ...Fascist leaders of Serbian politics threaten us with war in Kosovo, Mac...

The scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world. The invention of statistics was a major methodological advance in the descriptive sciences causing a shift from descriptive analysis to mathematical analysis. The new methodological techniques were invented by men who were interested in explaining the...

A model for the evolution of senescence known as "antagonistic pleiotropy" makes the specific prediction that there should be a negative genetic correlation between early- and late-age traits associated with fitness. This model has previously been tested by classical quantitative-genetic means including sib-analysis and artificial selection. We use...

A model for the evolution of senescence known as "antagonistic pleiotropy" makes the specific prediction that there should be a negative genetic correlation between early- and late-age traits associated with fitness. This model has previously been tested by classical quantitative-genetic means including sib-analysis and artificial selection. We use...

Despite the best intentions, sometimes foreign aid can be cruel and immoral. Take this example from Cambodia. When aid workers funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, discovered women and girls enslaved in brothels, they did nothing to free them. Instead, they overlooked the crime and blithely went on with research on the...

Title VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A030066) unpublished not peer reviewed