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1. Introduction
Human trafficking is a serious, global problem and is defined by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as “the acquisition of people by improper means such as force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them” (UNODC, 2018). It is a form of human slavery and involves people across gender, age and region (Bedford et al., 2017). Child trafficking represents a subset of this crime but is no less insidious, involving the exploitation of children for labor, sex, other nefarious purposes (Beyrer, 2004). Victims of child trafficking suffer from physical and psychological problems that curtail their development, and such children are unable to achieve their full potential in life.
Tackling the child trafficking problem requires a multi-pronged approach. Government and nongovernment organizations in different countries have launched initiatives ranging from awareness campaigns, education, and preventative and enforcement operations (e.g. O'Brien, 2016; Rafferty, 2013). In recent years, technology has changed the way trafficking is being done, making it easier for criminals to perform these activities and consequently, making it more challenging for anti-trafficking efforts to be successfully conducted. In response, there is now growing interest in the use of technology to disrupt traffickers' networks and combat child trafficking. Examples include facial recognition, alert mechanisms, data analytics and victim/criminal databases (Gerry et al., 2016; Han, 2019).
Complementing these efforts are initiatives involving individuals working together within and across communities. These include, for example, neighborhood watches where residents participate in crime prevention activities, and trafficking hotlines for the public to make reports. Such activities are important because prior research suggests that data from individuals can help to solve problems in local communities (Yoon and Copeland, 2019). With the popularity of the Internet, social media and mobile devices, public participation can now occur online in the form of crowdsourcing to help find trafficked children. Put succinctly, crowdsourcing mobilizes the skills and expertise of online users to address specific problems without being restricted by time and space (Doan et al., 2011). This very definition makes crowdsourcing suitable as a means to combat trafficking as children are often transported to different parts of a country or across borders. Through crowdsourcing, the people on the ground become the “eyes and ears”, reporting any suspicious...