By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

Long before the Epstein Files commanded the news media attention, several students and I presented our research at a pair of conferences.

Our question was this: What’s the best way to combat human trafficking domestically and worldwide? It turns out that economic and political freedom is the best means to do so, outperforming a series of other political, economic and social factors. And there are lessons for how the investigation of human trafficking proceeds.

When we started conducting our research more than ten years ago, I was surprised that my international political economy students were so passionate about the issue. “Dr. Tures, we’ve all seen the movie ‘Taken’ one undergraduate replied, referring to the 2008 movie thriller starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen.

LaGrange College research assistants Kadeshia Brown, Jeremy Ikner, Matthew James, Megan McDonald, Sean McNamee, Jessica Nelson, Oscar Prim III, Knox Robinson, and Isaiah Whitfield gathered data, literature review articles, and helped run the statistics. Our results were published in the Journal of Economic and Financial Systems in 2017. You can see the full results here.

One myth we examined was that free states would have governments too weak and divided to handle the problem. Authoritarian states, led by a strongman, would be much better at clamping down on odious practices such as child sex trafficking rings, right? Wrong.

Here are the sources we used. “Human trafficking data comes from research by Cho, Dreher and Neumayer (2011). The authors use three measures from the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Public Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, developed in 2000. This includes three 5-point scales that include a focus on prosecuting offenders, protecting victims of human trafficking, and preventing the crime of human trafficking from occurring in the first place.”

For economic freedom, we used Jim Gwartney and Bob Lawson’s Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) dataset. According to the authors, “[i]n order to achieve a high EFW rating, a country must provide secure protection of privately owned property, even-handed enforcement of contracts, and a stable monetary environment. It also must keep taxes low, refrain from creating barriers to both domestic and international trade, and rely more fully on markets rather than the political process to allocate goods and resources.” For political freedom, we used Freedom House’s respected measures of civil liberties and political rights. And just so people don’t think there’s a wealthy country bias, we ran numbers excluding all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the wealthiest and best developed in the world.

We found that economic and political freedom had a strong impact on prosecuting human traffickers, protecting victims, and preventing the practice from occurring in the first place. None of our other political, economic, and social factors had the same impact on human trafficking.

The students didn’t seem surprised by the results. One undergraduate pointed out. “Remember the corrupt government officials who allowed human trafficking to happen in the movie ‘Taken?’”

Though we did our research more than a decade ago, these results definitely matter for today’s debate. The United States has to decide whether to shed a lot of sunlight on the problem and expose those who was perpetuating this terrible system and victimizing the underage girls, or cover up the findings, destroy any evidence, and use some undemocratic power of the government to attack anyone seeking the truth.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.