The Big Bad Books series is designed to forewarn children to the recruitment and control schemes exploited by human traffickers. Using fables and age-appropriate language, the aim of these books is to socialize kids with the reality that most crime is committed by acquaintances or people we know, who attempt to gain our trust using coercion, deception, and fraud, and less often by strangers and through kidnapping. Big Bad and the Bored Canary is loosely inspired by the case of United States v. Aleksandr Maksimenko, where young women were lured from Ukraine to the United States, forced to work, and turn over the entirety of their earnings.