Assessing Human Trafficking Messaging: Indonesia

A team of research scholars from the University of Southern California has published a working paper assessing how an MTV documentary on human trafficking impacted knowledge, attitudes and behaviors among Indonesian youth. The project was produced under USAID’s C-TiP (Countering Traffic in Persons) Campus Challenge Research Grant initiative, and constructed using data from two components: a public opinion survey and an analysis of three social media networks—Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The researchers found that while the MTV documentary “had limited effects on increasing viewers’ knowledge of trafficking, awareness of vulnerability to trafficking, or intention to reduce vulnerability,” it did reveal useful insights for practitioners to improve the design and delivery of future C-TiP messaging. Such findings included the importance of working with faith-based organizations; creating gender-specific messaging and education programs; and developing toolkits that could be shared among community networks, as respondents indicated a low level of trust in the authorities.  

The full study is available here. 

Photo by United Nations Photo | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0