This book uses a mixed-methods approach to understand the role of technology in facilitating exploitation in the UK’s off-street sex markets. It offers a critical social perspective on a truly complex social phenomenon encapsulating both online and offline spaces. It makes quite complex topics, including web scraping, data mining, and big data analytics, accessible to a wider audience through the careful introduction and discussion of a series of interrelated topics relevant to the trafficking-technology nexus. It synthesises critical social theory with critical data studies to offer a nuanced perspective on the role of technology in facilitating organised exploitation within the sex market. It discusses the practical implications for policing and harm reduction in the context of exploitation in the sex market. In addition to being of particular interest to law enforcement practitioners, researchers, and students of the sex market, exploitation and human trafficking, it will also be of interest as a contemporary case study of digital criminology or computational criminology.

This book uses a mixed-methods approach to understand the role of technology in facilitating exploitation in the UK’s off-street sex markets. It offers a critical social perspective on a truly complex social phenomenon encapsulating both online and offline spaces. It makes quite complex topics, including web scraping, data mining, and big data analytics, accessible to a wider audience through the careful introduction and discussion of a series of interrelated topics relevant to the trafficking-technology nexus. It synthesises critical social theory with critical data studies to offer a nuanced perspective on the role of technology in facilitating organised exploitation within the sex market. It discusses the practical implications for policing and harm reduction in the context of exploitation in the sex market. In addition to being of particular interest to law enforcement practitioners, researchers, and students of the sex market, exploitation and human trafficking, it will also be of interest as a contemporary case study of digital criminology or computational criminology.