Social service providers' knowledge of domestic sex trafficking in the Canadian context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian research on the domestic sex trafficking of adolescents and adults is in its infancy with little exploration of social service providers' knowledge. This is an important gap as international research has identified that providers are well situated yet often lack the knowledge necessary to identify and help sex trafficked persons. The current study used a critical social approach to examine social service providers' knowledge about domestic sex trafficking in Canada. Fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom with diverse providers from Ontario. Interviews were analyzed using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis. Analysis revealed varying levels of knowledge among providers, sometimes inconsistent with self-rated expertise and experience. Some providers with moderate-to-high expertise conveyed detailed knowledge of sex trafficking definitions and a continuum between sex work and sex trafficking while others with the same reported expertise conflated sex work and sex trafficking, suggesting that they may have over-estimated their level of knowledge. Most discussed “vulnerabilities” perceived as increasing sex trafficking risk: lack of belonging, stigmatization, societal and individual level racism. Providers described tactics used by traffickers to lure and retain individuals in sex trafficking. Formal education about sex trafficking across regions and providers was lacking, suggesting that sex trafficked persons are subject to the “luck of the draw” when seeking help from social service providers. The development of a core curriculum could help ensure that all social service providers in Canada–and other jurisdictions in which domestic sex trafficking is an issue–have the necessary knowledge to appropriately address sex trafficked persons' needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".