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Biography

Ava Kamdem is a researcher, consultant, and executive who brings lived experience to all of her leadership endeavors. Her personal and professional journey informs her work across sectors, including specific experience and expertise in trauma-informed program design, equity-centered evaluation, and strategic advising for organizing advancing justice, public health, and economic opportunity. Ava also serves as the Executive Director of Savhera Foundation, a nonprofit that advises social enterprises in developing an organizational culture that catalyzes healing, dignity, and economic mobility for survivors of exploitation and incarceration. She earned a degree in Psychology from Columbia University, where she led system-impacted student initiatives and published research on leadership, human capital and equity. Ava’s leadership is grounded in a deep commitment to structural transformation, survivor-led innovation, and the belief that healing and justice must be built into the very fabric of our institutions. (ava@savhera.org)

Vanessa Bouché serves as Chief Impact Officer at Allies Against Slavery and formerly as an Associate Professor at Texas Christian University. With nearly two decades of experience, she has led over $3 million in federally funded research on human trafficking and wrongful convictions, including conducting public opinion research on human trafficking in the U.S., Moldova, and Albania, conducting trauma-informed surveys with survivors of human trafficking in the U.S. and Honduras, building the largest open-access database of federally prosecuted human trafficking cases, and maintaining one of the largest datasets on anti-trafficking policy adoption across the United States. Dr. Bouché has published extensively on human trafficking, delivered over 50 invited speaking engagements to diverse audiences globally, consults on strategy, research, and impact for many organizations, and serves as an expert witness in human trafficking litigation. In 2017, inspired by a survivor's plea for dignified employment, she founded a business to provide sustainable jobs to trafficking survivors in India and the U.S. She serves on the Board of Directors for Freedom Business Alliance. She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, her MPAff from the University of Texas at Austin, and her B.A. from Columbia University. (vanessa@alliesagainstslavery.org )

Ben Silver, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia’s Center for Justice, an interdisciplinary research center focused on alternatives to mass incarceration and the intersection between psychology and the criminal justice system. Before beginning his postdoc, Ben completed his PhD in Columbia’s Psychology Department, under the supervision of Dr. Kevin Ochsner, in April 2025. His research focuses on processes of change; namely, how social and affective motivations impact how we change our beliefs about other people and ourselves. He often investigates these questions using natural language processing tools. At the Center for Justice, he is working on an evaluation of a community violence intervention, which will be partially based on dozens of interviews collected from participants in the intervention, as well as the intervention’s facilitators/stakeholders. Before his PhD, Ben received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and worked as a lab manager at Weill Cornell Medicine. (bms2202@columbia.edu)

Nick Freeman, Ph.D. is a Professor of Operations Management at The University of Alabama and a major contributor to the NSF-funded STANDD initiative, which develops advanced analytics techniques for combating sex trafficking. This work has been recognized as a finalist for three awards offered by INFORMS, with related research published in Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, and Scientific Data. Dr. Freeman serves as an Associate Director of the Institute of Data and Analytics, Co-coordinator for the Master of Science in Business Analytics program, and Associate Editor of INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics. His broader expertise spans mathematical modeling, simulation, network modeling, and applied predictive modeling, with additional publications in INFORMS Journal on Computing. (freem028@ua.edu)

Justin Euteneier is a Director of Programs at Epik Project. He equips male civilians in the US to speak directly to sex buyers at the point of sale, disrupt cultural acceptance of exploitation, and seek areas of our lives as men where we can work towards creating an equitable and flourishing culture. Justin holds a Master's Degree in Social Justice from Kilns College, has presented at the MIT Counter Human Trafficking Workshop, and has 10+ years of experience working in the anti-human trafficking movement. At Epik Project, Justin has designed and built an innovative buyer engagement platform that has led to over 200,000 purchase attempts from 100,000 buyers in the US utilizing all-male volunteer efforts. (justin@epikproject.org)

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which online sex buyer communities in the United States function as organized criminal networks pursuant to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime’s definition of organized criminal groups. Drawing from theories of organized crime, social network analysis, and digital ecosystems, we conceptualize sex buyers not as isolated actors but as participants in coordinated, mutually reinforcing networks that share information to facilitate exploitation, mitigate risk, and sustain criminal behavior. To test this framework, we scraped over 1.2 million posts from a publicly accessible sex buyer forum, comprising 72,974 unique users and nearly 800,000 direct replies. We identified location-based subgroups and influential users within the network using community detection methods. A custom-trained large language model was then used to detect and categorize “criminal acts” and “benefits” behaviors that aid in criminal facilitation, such as law enforcement avoidance, provider vetting, and service coordination. Our findings reveal persistent network structures, role differentiation, and shared norms consistent with organized criminal enterprises. Central users act as facilitators, and discussions frequently center on risk management and the normalization of exploitative behavior. These results challenge the perception of sex buyers as lone actors and suggest a decentralized but structured criminal ecosystem. This study contributes to criminological theory and anti-trafficking policy by offering a new lens to understand and disrupt digital demand in the commercial sex trade.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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