Trusted traffickers and prosocial humanities: exploring Ukrainian student vulnerabilities to wartime cross-border risks

This paper focuses on students’ potential vulnerability to trust in individuals who might act as facilitators of human trafficking or trafficking-adjacent fraud. The methods used are corpus analysis, conceptual (frame) analysis, and a reading intervention. The media corpus of 115,973 words was used for frame analysis to reveal traffickers’ static and dynamic characteristics. A single-group two-stage pre−/post-reading study involving 69 B.A. students from Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University was conducted using eight media fragments. SPSS Software for Windows 26 was used to analyze the empirical data. Paired-samples analysis showed significantly lower post-reading trust in volunteers, agency representatives, prospective employers, and relatives or friends (V2–V5, V8), whereas trust in loving partners and several categories of unfamiliar people offering help (V6–V7, V9-V10) did not change significantly. These findings are interpreted as within-participant changes in self-reported trust. The results identify trust as a marker of one potential component of trafficking-related vulnerability and support further controlled research into linguistic and educational strategies for primary prevention to address stable patterns of misplaced trust associated with trafficking recruitment tactics. The study contributes to primary prevention through prosocial humanities for protective awareness.