The UNL College of Business continued its leadership in the area of human trafficking by hosting the 2nd Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking. CBA Marketing professor and conference co-coordinator Dwayne Ball stressed that the key to the conference success is in the word 'interdisciplinary'.

"When you think about human trafficking its one of those things that can't be studied in isolation by any one discipline," said Ball. "You can't study it purely as a legal problem, law enforcement problem, social problem or as a problem of business and profits to be brought down. You have to study it from all of these angles if you want to bring it down."

Ball said that the two day conference was a success because among the 100 attendees and 50 presenters were people from every discipline necessary to examine the world problem of human slavery and trade.

"It was interesting to go to a conference in a field that is just beginning to realize that it is a discipline requiring study. The excitement was palpable. Everyone was involved in every presentation and people were networking like crazy so it was very exciting to see that going on."

B.J. Skinner was the keynote speaker for the conference. Skinner is an award winning journalist who has spent years studying the problem of human trafficking. He also spoke to a sold out audience at the E.N. Thompson Forum Series the night before the conference began.

"Skinner has some remarkable things to say," said Ball. "They kept him there asking questions for quite a while afterwards. Most people find it difficult to believe that human slavery still exists anywhere in the world. And yet there are more slaves and people enslaved today than there ever has been in the history of humankind. Now it's a smaller fraction of the total population than before but human misery is not relative. One person enslaved in misery is one person enslaved in misery and that's an absolute thing."

Ball says that the Human Trafficking team has been very pleased with the results of the first two conferences and plan on keeping UNL at the forefront of research and education when it comes to the issue of human trafficking.

Human Trafficking Conference web site.