https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7983-0554
Following a successful session on human trafficking at the European Society of Conference annual meeting in Malaga, Spain, in September 2022, both editors of the special issue engaged in several conversations with the presenters at the conference, which sparked the idea for this special issue. As veteran researchers and writers on trafficking in persons (TIP), we both felt, despite much progress made in the field, a sense of inadequacy and narrow-mindedness in how we perceive and respond to human trafficking. Perhaps this was because anti-trafficking research and intervention remain nascent in its development but growing in status as a social science and policy topic.
Our primary purpose was to use this special issue to discuss the (conspicuous) gaps in our current knowledge of research and intervention in anti-trafficking efforts worldwide. Our recruitment approach was straightforward, albeit somewhat conventional; we relied on our professional networks and contributors to reach those actively involved in either research or programming on anti-trafficking topics.
We intended this special issue to be broad in topical areas and inclusive in the authors’ analytical approach because we do not profess to understand what and where the significant gaps lie in current efforts to combat human trafficking. As a result, we invited a diverse group of experienced researchers and practitioners to contribute to this project. More importantly, we sought voices from the global south for inclusion in this volume, e.g., India, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and South Africa. We also recognize that there are far more geographical regions and labor sectors that are not addressed in this volume. We must acknowledge that our “inclusive” endeavor was far from perfect since the timing and our proposed deadline were inconvenient for a few potential contributors, thus restricting the geographical and topical coverage. Still, we are happy with what we have accomplished, as the readers will see the two broad categories of the articles included here: (1) short and poignant articles (10 in total) representing viewpoints from front-line organizations and active researchers who speak directly to the challenges of meeting their objectives and mandates; and (2) eight full-length evidence-informed articles that engage in thorough analyses to expose specific gaps in current anti-trafficking efforts.
Introduction to the Short Essays
Relative to other topics in the broad disciplines such as inequality, labor rights, or criminal justice, research on human trafficking is still a comparatively fledgling interdisciplinary field in which scholars of increasing diversity have become significantly more engaged in the topic and its diverse issues. While all covered under the broad umbrella of human trafficking, we attempted to include many fronts. In these short essays, we imposed word limits to encourage more scholars and practitioners to succinctly highlight gaps in current countermeasures or research endeavors that have either been ignored or rarely attended to. These short essays significantly improved our coverage of a special issue and allowed us to highlight areas where future intervention development research or research on human trafficking, in general, may evolve. As the readers will hopefully discover, the diversity of our captured gaps is impressive.
Some authors argue for specific structural inadequacies in their respective national contexts, while others bring forth particularly vulnerable populations that have received limited attention or have mainly been overlooked. A few authors point out inadequate criminal justice strategies for human trafficking and insufficient coordination between justice providers. Still, a few other authors focused on topics that only began to attract attention in recent years in this field. For example, the anti-trafficking intervention programs have recently embraced climate change as a significant cause contributing to forced migration by vulnerable populations from developing countries, thus increasing exposure to forced labor and sex trafficking situations. Phon and Rice use the trafficking situation in Cambodia to illustrate the devastating impacts of climate change and resultant natural and manmade disasters. As a Tier 3 country in the least developed part of Southeast Asia, Cambodia remains a country of source, transit, and destination of trafficking in persons (TIP). The challenges are immense, but both authors propose linking climate-induced disasters and forced migration to TIP responses, which may prove more effective than past efforts.
Further, we have included emerging topics that are also timely in the current international context. Lasocik, from the University of Warsaw in Poland, was among the first academics to raise the issue of potential human trafficking violations against the many young women and girls who fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Because large-scale military conflicts inevitably subject large numbers of civilians to vulnerable conditions, the war in Ukraine is no different. Millions of Ukrainians, mostly women and children, crossed into Poland with little more than the clothes on their backs. Through interviews at the refugee reception centers, the author and his colleagues discovered that few were even thinking about the potential consequence of human trafficking that might befall these refugees. Losocik argued that while hot soup and a blanket are necessary for immediate survival, Western countries must do more to protect the refugees from becoming the prime targets for human trafficking. The impact of armed conflict frequently spills over national boundaries; currently, the capacity of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to combat human trafficking activities has largely been absent despite UN Sustainable Development Goal 16. Vojta from the University of Bern points out this glaring gap by analyzing the ICC’s procedural capacity to combat human trafficking and how domestic investigations and prosecutions can be elevated to the international level.
Aside from timely and emerging topics, we have also included topics that have been widely covered in other places. For example, problems in TIP data science (e.g., data collection, measurement, sampling strategy, and prevalence estimation) have received much attention over the past two decades in the TIP research community. Although it is an ongoing problem, it is essential to continue the discussion because data science, in its broadest sense, is the foundation of this emerging research field and determines the quality of our future scientific inquiries. The research community has made much progress on human trafficking in the past two decades, and scientific literature has grown significantly. Among the most significant progress in research on human trafficking is the increasing publications based on primary data collection and improvement in measurement and prevalence estimation techniques. The research community has made significant efforts to create consensus on the standard indicators on the proverbial challenge of establishing the threshold to identify our target populations. Even when primary data collection remains a luxury for many researchers, those first-hand cases collected by service providers and government agencies are also actively pursued by those equipped with advanced training in statistics in their application of the multiple-system estimation (MSE). By relying on identified human trafficking cases across more than one social service agency, researchers can estimate the population size and other profiles of their study population.
The improvement of empirical data is sorely needed by community-based agencies that seek to improve and refine their anti-trafficking efforts. For example, Alejano-Steele and colleagues at the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking [LCHT] in Colorado reviewed lessons learned from their agency’s efforts to measure progress in Colorado. The Denver-based Laboratory to initiated its anti-trafficking efforts in 2005, the same year that federal grant monies poured into Colorado to establish coalitions to conduct law enforcement and service provider training and create protocols to support victims of human trafficking. On the global level, veteran researcher Jan Van Dijk, emeritus professor in victimology at Tilburg University, pointed out the progress made by major international organizations in bringing about multi-source datasets on trafficking victims as more credible sources of information on the true prevalence of human trafficking and argued for consolidation and comprehensive analysis for better scientific inquiry and policymaking on a global level.
Readers will find equally compelling gaps in current anti-trafficking programs and research in several other aspects. Readers will notice our emphasis on a variety of international voices. Dandurand from Canada points out that criminalizing human trafficking worldwide, starting from the UN Convention and its related protocols on trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling, has not produced adequate law enforcement response or strengthened international cooperation. This lackluster situation sharply contrasts the increased numbers of potential trafficking victims, as various studies and agency reports reported. With the new technologies, traffickers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, posing further challenges to law enforcement agencies worldwide. Wood from BRAVE Education points out the sharp discrepancies between well-intended and lofty political and legal rhetoric and the lack of concrete enforcement. Vojta from Switzerland points out that the transnational nature of human trafficking activities should push the intervention field toward exploring the potential of the ICC. ICC can contribute to the fight against human trafficking, but its role and legal capacity have been mainly neglected in current discourses. The author offers several concrete solutions to elevate human trafficking to an international crime level and bring the ICC into the fight through effective prosecution.
Full-Length Articles
Our full-length articles, however, mainly address systemic problems that are not necessarily unknown but have long remained understudied. Unlike the short essays, authors in this section were asked to develop a comprehensive analysis and apply conventional research paper format to present methods, data analysis and findings. While the range of a topics is somewhat limited due to the length of these articles, they nonetheless represent a series of well-developed and conceptualized analyses on the most current state of research in the TIP field.
Our emphasis on identifying and analyzing gaps in current anti-trafficking efforts made our collection of full-length analytical papers critical in their findings and discussions. Most authors called out structural and systemic obstacles in national response plans, while others pointed out the need to know the impact of the existing program. For example, Winterdyk points out that despite being a Tier 1 country, Canada needs more coordination in its counter-trafficking effort. Applying a case study method, the author drew on a wide range of examples and existing data to highlight a “quilted patchwork” that is Canada’s current response to trafficking. Foot’s article points out that news media hold significant promise in searching for and promoting solutions to human trafficking and bringing greater attention to TIP issues.
Zhang and colleagues from National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago carried out a large-scale social survey of recently returned migrant workers in the metropolitan area of Nairobi, Kenya, and the findings confirm what many news stories in recent years reported on the abuses of Kenyan migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Findings from this study help bridge a critical gap in human trafficking research: the lack of reliable data and how best to collect it threaten the effectiveness of existing and proposed interventions in the GCC. Using rigorous estimation strategies, this team of researchers found victimization of forced labor pervasive in this population. Although abuses among migrant workers are not uncommon in wealthy nations, such high rates of forced labor violations in GCC countries are rare, if not unprecedented, in current prevalence estimation research and call for massive systemic efforts to address the situation.
In their full-length article, Childress and colleagues at Northeastern University explore the varied obstacles that undermine the prosecution of human traffickers in the U.S. criminal justice system. Taking a case study approach, the team examined the criminal legal process of five different cases, identifying barriers that derailed offender prosecution and stymied victim support. The findings were based on rich data from legal advocate case records, client interview notes, correspondence between stakeholders, court records, and stakeholder interviews.
Based on their direct observations of funded research and intervention because of their official positions, Long and Risko provide a rich account of significant gaps in current trafficking research. Using the Program to End Modern Slavery’s (PEMS) platform, the authors explore the progress and current challenges in searching for and evaluating various anti-trafficking interventions. PEMS represents the latest efforts by the U.S. government to implement anti-trafficking intervention and research worldwide, focusing on what works and how to evaluate and build the knowledge base for best practices.
In response to the current focus on negative news stories, Foot uses her full-length article to argue for a new orientation in the news media, focusing on constructive solutions to the reported problems. Significant social impact may be realized through such constructive journalism. The author highlights several open-access resources designed to catalyze better journalism on human trafficking.
Balch and Hesketh from the University of Liverpool examine four critical gaps in the evidence-policy relationship on human trafficking in the UK: prioritization, epistemology, synchronization and trust. Drawing on multiple sources, the authors point to a growing consensus on improving research on human trafficking and creating appropriate conditions for a productive evidence-policy system.
Finally, Friedman’s article calls for greater attention to and transparency of the supply chain, where the private sector has an essential role in our fight against modern slavery through ethical business practices. Because of the complex global supply chains and the myriad of suppliers and subcontractors, companies need to work together to self-police their products or services against potential human rights abuses and exploitative labor practices. Solutions to reduce exploitative labor practices and human rights abuses include strict supply chain management policies, transparency in their operations, and oversight through a collaborative partnership with civil society organizations. The tremendous purchasing power affords the private sector a unique and powerful position to reduce the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.
Sensitive and Exciting New Directions
While striving for inclusivity, we are keenly aware that some of the viewpoints expressed in this collection can be controversial, and we are not naïve about or blind to the political and cultural sensitivity in the identified gaps. For example, van der Watt from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation calls for a shift of counter-sex trafficking measures toward demand reduction. The overlapping nature of prostitution and sex trafficking requires that for any effective interventions to be effective, countermeasures must hold sex buyers accountable. Van der Watt argues that current anti-sex trafficking efforts frequently ignore “the glaring role of sex buyers in ringfencing sex trafficking crimes, shrouding traffickers, and obscuring victims.” Although prostitution remains illegal in most parts of the United States, there is no shortage of advocates elsewhere, particularly in the Western world, who argue that sex work, when brought into the legal marketplace and properly regulated, may help curtail sex trafficking.
In another example, many anti-trafficking efforts since the beginning of the new millennium in India have focused on sex trafficking and were funded by institutions high on Western moral principles that pursued a raid-rescue-and-rehabilitation model in programming. Instead of welcoming these externally funded programs, open resentment and hostility often emerged among the communities toward these moral-driven intervention services. After witnessing years of ineffective anti-trafficking efforts, Shipurkar and colleagues from Praxis Institute for Participatory Practices in New Delhi, India, use the Nat and Bediya communities as examples to advocate a holistic and participatory model that recognizes the complexities of caste-based discrimination, limited livelihood options and deep-rooted social norms toward sex trade. Their approach aims to foster agency and empower community members to redefine their identities and improve livelihood choices.
We are also cognizant of the multiplicity of causes for trafficking victimization and complexity in any suggested solutions. For example, Kavenagh, Stoeltje, and Dank highlighted the challenges in assisting vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ populations and the inadequate effort to address predicaments unique to these individuals. In addition to the typical vulnerabilities at-risk populations face, such as poverty, domestic violence and abuse, homelessness, unemployment, and migration status, LGBTQ+ individuals face community and workplace stigma due to their gender identities. Their frequent reliance on insecure informal gig economies for survival further complicates efforts to develop sustainable intervention efforts. Unlike conventional “rescue and rebuilding” type programming, these authors propose solutions that focus on diversifying livelihood choices while fostering psychological safety and reducing individual-level impacts of systemic stigma and discrimination.
Finally, Gadd and Broad bring forth TIP cases where victims were also offenders. While seeking protection and defense in the courts, these victims of trafficking are increasingly being viewed with suspicion. The ensuing controversy threatens to unravel the British government’s agenda on victim protection. Drawing on their research data, the authors discuss the circumstances within which victims are compelled to offend and argue that academics and activists should remain vocal about how victims of human trafficking rarely fit the stereotypes commonly afforded in the criminal justice system and point out the existing immigration regime gives few choices to these victims and remain hostile to them as a social class.
We aimed to bring these issues into open for candid conversations among researchers and practitioners. Throughout this effort, we remain non-judgmental and hope to provide a venue for broader engagement and collaboration between researchers and practitioners as we face a common challenge to reduce or eradicate human suffering. We believe in multiple venues suitable for different cultural and political contexts along with this common goal. As usual, all authors here expressed their viewpoints that do not necessarily represent their employers.
Finally, although not exhaustive, we reflect on the articles presented in this issue and offer some pragmatic questions that might help to further inspire established and emerging scholars to narrow the gaps in our efforts to combat/reduce human trafficking effectively and efficiently:
How might we better identify the “other” victims of human trafficking (e.g., LGBTQ+, boys, persons with some type of physical or emotional challenge(s), minority groups, etc.)?
How might we improve our efforts to support victims of trafficking (e.g., access to justice, the range of complex needs survivors/victims have, guidelines for frontline workers, ensuring “proper” support for frontline workers [e.g., social workers, law enforcement, NGOs], etc.)?
How can we coordinate and manage data collection activities to enable greater comparative analysis?
How can we better apply robust methodologies and develop theories to guide our understanding of human trafficking issues?
How might we improve the detection, apprehension, and prosecution of human trafficking perpetrators?
How might we shift the lens from being reactive to human trafficking to being more proactive?
How might we improve (i.e., effectively and efficiently) bridging the gaps in the corporate partnership landscape to combat human trafficking?
How might we better address the growing diversity with which modern technology (e.g., social networking) is used to recruit prospective victims or vice versa to reduce individual vulnerability?
How can we better accumulate and disseminate practical tools or technology to combat human trafficking?
How might we develop and deploy rigorous methods to evaluate the impact or outcomes of the massive public resources invested in anti-trafficking programs so that best practices can be accumulated through accountability and knowledge building?
Despite our efforts, we fully acknowledge that this special issue has some inherent limitations, but like all “good” movies, we anticipate/hope that this issue will inspire a sequel(s) that will begin to narrow the gaps in our current state of knowledge and efforts to combat human trafficking – in all forms.