Ieke de Vries is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology.

More information about Ieke de Vries

General

Ieke de Vries is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. She received her Ph.D. at Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts) and was previously appointed as an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University (Tallahassee, Florida).

Research

Ieke is a criminologist with expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods to study human trafficking and other hidden or hard-to-observe crime types. Her research focuses on the Netherlands and the United States. In her doctoral work, Ieke de Vries utilized unique online and administrative data to identify the spatial and social mechanisms that drive commercial sex and sex trafficking in illicit massage businesses in the U.S. Specifically, she examined the geographic and spatial features of census tracts and cities that have illicit massage businesses, analyzed the mobility of clientele through a spatial network approach, and evaluated the impact of police shutdowns on the overall geographic distribution of illicit massage businesses. Her research was awarded a Research Fellowship from the National Institute of Justice in the U.S.

Her research agenda focuses on a set of related themes, including law enforcement responses to human trafficking and other complex crime types, risk factors for (repeat) victimization, and the broader socio-ecological context of crime and victimization. To investigate these themes, she employs quantitative, including computational, and qualitative methods. Examples of these methods are qualitative interviews, digital research methods, regression analyses, social network analyses, spatial analyses, and machine learning. The results of her research provide a scientific foundation for tackling crime types such as human trafficking.

Ieke’s research has repeatedly received external funding, including grants by the Leiden University Fund, a starting grant, and in 2023 her research about the role of context in the sexual exploitation of children and young adults was awarded a VENI-grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Her VENI-research utilizes unique and longitudinal data about people and their socio-ecological contexts and innovative methods to develop new insights into victimization and risk contagion 

Teaching

Within the bachelor's program Ieke de Vries coordinates the courses Human Trafficking and Environmental Criminology. She also supervises master's theses and regularly offers internships and/or research positions for ongoing projects.  

Publications