User:Melholle

The Project
I am a senior at Drake University, studying Psychology and Music. My project is studying human trafficking in the Dominican Republic. The page I am editing is entitled, Human Trafficking in the Dominican Republic, and this is the webpage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Dominican_Republic. My reason for wanting to research the Dominican Republic is because I went on a mission trip there in March of 2012 and am returning again this March. I have many friends there and so I would like to learn more about their culture and the issues in the surrounding area. I know that human trafficking, Haitian violence, and gangs, are some of the primary issues there which are the factors I will be researching. Our course page is Education Program:Drake University/Global Youth Studies (Spring 2013).

This is also my sandbox page for those who are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Melholle/sandbox#References

Where I am at with the project
After looking at the information I decided to narrow my focus onto human trafficking within the Caribbean, looking specifically at the Dominican Republic. I found an interesting article through the HAPI Search Engine called, Sex, AIDS, migration and prostitution: human trafficking in the Caribbean, written by Catherine Benoit. The article is from the New West Indian Guide. I have not been able to look at the article in its entirety yet because I had to order it through Interlibrary Loan. There are some other articles I was able to fully access. One was entitled, Trafficking in persons in Latin America and the Caribbean by Clare Biando Seelke. My goal is to establish what human trafficking is and if there are different categories of human trafficking. For example, there are women and children who are sold into prostitution and some for manual labor; I want to learn if there are other any categories. I plan to not only find statistics on human trafficking in certain areas of the Caribbean, but also address why this is such a prevalent issue in this region.

Although it is important to discuss human trafficking in the Caribbean, it is also important to discuss the consequences of trafficking; one of which is HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS has been increasing drastically due to human trafficking. Human rights issues are also something that I may choose to discuss more and maybe try to incorporate any laws (if there are any in effect) into my Wikipedia article. I was doing a little pre-research research and found an article called, The impact of human trafficking on people and countries by Freida M’Cormack. Although she may not be from the Caribbean she will have some potentially good insight as to how the Caribbean is affected in many ways by human trafficking.

A big problem that I found from my Wikipedia research was that most of the information was given from a Western point of view. As a result, my goal will try to find research from individuals from the Caribbean more than of people from the United States. I did look on the HAPI search engine for some information but most of the articles are written in Spanish and I do not speak that language fluently. I am currently trying to locate more articles that are from natives of the area but am having some difficulty doing so while at the same time finding articles in English. That is all for now, I hope it makes sense and I am looking forward to really get going on the Wikipedia project!

Assignment for 3/27 Articles Melholle (talk) 23:20, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

4/5/2013 Hi all! I forgot to add that the wikipedia article I am editing is the one entitled "Human trafficking in the Dominican Republic This is the link :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Dominican_Republic thanks! Melholle (talk) 22:36, 5 April 2013 (UTC)