A Concept Discovery Approach for Fighting Human Trafficking and Forced Prostitution

Since the fall of the Iron curtain starting in 1989 in Hungary, millions of Central and Eastern European girls and women have been forced to work in the European sex industry (estimated 175,000 to 200,000 yearly). In this paper, we present our work with the Amsterdam-Amstelland (Netherlands) police to find suspects and victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution. 266,157 suspicious activity reports were filed by police officers between 2005 and 2009 that contain their observations made during a police patrol, motor vehicle inspection, etc. We used FCA to filter out interesting persons for further investigation and used the temporal variant of FCA to create a visual profile of these persons, their evolution over time and their social environment. We exposed multiple cases of forced prostitution where sufficient indications were available to obtain the permission from the Public Prosecutor to use special investigation techniques. This resulted in a confirmation of their involvement in human trafficking and forced prostitution resulting in actual arrestments being made.