In 2018, police in Derbyshire and Latvia exposed a large human trafficking operation. Victims were being transported from Latvia to Derby and forced into labour. Students and staff at Sheffield Hallam have evaluated the joint investigation to help future operations.

“The police, when they started to investigate this realised that not only was what they were seeing human trafficking, but it was actually part of an organised crime network that had been in place for many years, and as the police continued with the investigation they identified several victims, they identified the working patterns of the gang, and that's when they moved in to make arrests to break up that gang."

Dr Craig Paterson 

“What was really unique about this project is that there were people from so many different academic areas, so criminologists, people who are focused on criminal justice. My contributions for the project is that of a student researcher. Interviewing members of the police, professionals within the police service both from the UK and Latvia was really interesting because I've never worked on criminal justice before, and I think it's really important to have an understanding of the whole picture."

Annie Purcell, MA Applied Human Rights