The Impact of Culturally Tailored Community Education on Willingness to Advocate for Human Trafficking Prevention Among Immigrant Populations

Background and Purpose: Florida ranks third nationally in reported human trafficking cases, with immigrant communities facing disproportionate risks due to linguistic isolation and social exclusion. Yet most prevention programs are exclusively anglocentric, leaving English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) populations without accessible education. This study examines whether culturally tailored community education increases willingness to advocate for human trafficking prevention compared to general education. We propose an integrated theoretical framework linking three mechanisms in a causal pathway. First, cultural tailoring (Pecos Melton et al., 2024) serves as the independent variable: education designed around a community’s values, experiences, and language grounds the issue in culturally resonant contexts. Second, this culturally grounded content reduces psychological distance, the core mechanism drawn from Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010): when trafficking is framed as something happening “now and here to someone like me,” participants shift from abstract awareness to concrete, actionable understanding. Third, reduced psychological distance strengthens the three components of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991)—attitudes (“this is the right thing to do”), subjective norms (“people around me do this”), and perceived behavioral control (“I have the ability to act”)—which in turn increase advocacy willingness. The hypothesized causal pathway is: culturally tailored education (IV) → reduced psychological distance (mediator) → strengthened TPB factors (attitudes, norms, control) → increased advocacy willingness (DV).

Methods: This ongoing study employs a field experimental design with a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach. Through a university-nonprofit partnership between the University of Central Florida and The Lifeboat Project, community education sessions are delivered in four languages: Korean, Spanish, Chinese, and English. Within each group, participants are randomly assigned to a control condition (general human trafficking education) or treatment (culturally tailored content). The English group serves as a baseline control. Both conditions complete pre- and post-surveys using a 9-item, 5-point Likert scale measuring knowledge, awareness, reporting capacity, and advocacy willingness. The DiD framework isolates the causal effect of cultural tailoring by comparing pre-post changes between treatment and control groups. Data collection is currently underway, with sessions delivered to additional communities on a rolling basis.

Results: Preliminary results (n=20) show substantial pre- to post-training improvements. The largest gains were: awareness of trafficking severity (+2.1 on a 5-point scale), knowledge of reporting procedures (+1.7), recognition of suspected signs (+1.6), identification of dangerous applications (+1.4), and ability to explain online exploitation (+1.3). Community action indicators showed modest positive shifts. As data collection continues across language groups, the DiD analysis will formally test whether the treatment group demonstrates significantly greater gains, isolating the added value of cultural tailoring.

Conclusions and Implications: Preliminary findings suggest that community-based prevention education meaningfully increases knowledge among immigrant populations. The ongoing DiD analysis will provide rigorous evidence on whether culturally tailored content produces significantly greater advocacy willingness than general education. This work offers a replicable, partnership-driven framework for integrating cultural competence into public safety infrastructure, with implications for social work practice and policy in centering marginalized populations in prevention design.