The Fight against Human Trafficking

Drivers and Spoilers

Maria Ravlik

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030332037
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030332044
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a quantitative, cross-nationally comparative, longitudinal, and multilevel study of the drivers and spoilers of national governments' anti-trafficking measures. Both macro-level determinants of anti-trafficking enforcement and micro-level foundations of human trafficking are unfolded and explored. Large-N comparative research examines how characteristics of countries interact with people's attitudes towards violence to better understand what creates environments that are more or less supportive of governments' anti-trafficking efforts. The results presented in the book are highly relevant from the perspectives of global governance and human rights protection.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. RavlikThe Fight against Human Traffickinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33204-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maria Ravlik¹

(1)

Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany

Maria Ravlik

Abstract

The introduction describes the difficulties of accurately measuring the scope of human trafficking crime and hence, gaps in quantitative research in this field. Responding to these difficulties in global comparative analysis, this book offers to work with quantifiable data on enforcement of the legislation against human trafficking or as the literature refers to it—anti-trafficking enforcement data. The introduction includes a short review of the most recent literature and previous studies on anti-trafficking enforcement by addressing the root causes of human trafficking.

Keywords

Anti-trafficking enforcement dataQuantitative researchGlobal indicesHindrances to effective anti-trafficking enforcement

End Abstract

Today the rough estimates of enslaved people range from 20.9 million (ILO 2012) to 45.8 million (Free the Slaves 2016). Although the trustworthiness of these estimates remains uncertain, if they are remotely accurate, they can easily exceed the Atlantic slave trade or any other time in the history of humankind. “Modern slavery” differs from the days of white slavery when people were publicly bought and sold for forced labor. Nowadays, it is the recruitment, transportation or transfer of persons using threat, force or coercion for sexual exploitation, forced labor, or both and officially is called human trafficking.¹ Rapidly developing, human trafficking ranks third in the list of international crimes. For a trafficker, the economic incentive is too high and the possibility of getting caught in a country, which does not apply anti-trafficking policies , is too low, hence, sadly, trafficking continues to thrive. According to the testimony of one trafficker, a criminal can buy a woman² for 10,000 dollars then force the victim to earn back the money in a week, and everything else from that point on amounts to a profit, which can reach up to 250,000 dollars in a year (Yen 2008). The financial returns in human trafficking are very tempting because a pimp can sell one woman many times, unlike drugs and arms.

Dealing with such a criminal and sensible issue as human trafficking, scholars, practitioners, lawyers, and others who are interested in the matter are facing the lack of reliable data on victims of human trafficking . The process of being recognized as a victim of human trafficking often goes along with a mark of shame in some countries. In such cultures, it is sometimes forbidden to marry a non-virgin. Thus, women who escaped the bondage of slavery and returned home are now being shamed for not meeting “marriage material.” Many women prefer not to make their victim statuses official or even disclose their experiences, which makes the data collection a laborious exercise. In some instances, not claiming herself/himself a victim is a question of safety. When reporting on their abusers, victims put themselves or their families at risk of a trafficker’s persecution. Another complication is that many people remain hostage to traffickers, and this number is impossible to calculate with precision. Although the lack of real data on victims of human trafficking remains a massive obstacle in this field, it is still possible to evaluate how countries are dealing with the problem of human trafficking via imposing various legislative measures against this crime. Studies refer to these measures as anti-trafficking enforcement data . They include enactment of laws prohibiting trafficking, criminal penalties prescribed for human trafficking, identification of victims, and others.³

Back in the early 2000s, by applying purposeful efforts supported by policymakers, the first official definition of human trafficking was proposed for the first time together with a set of policies regulating how governments should address the problem of human trafficking in order to combat it successfully. Like in every international policy area, countries enforce anti-trafficking policies differently, and that called for the development of specific indices, which would help to trace how well countries comply and follow international regulations to combat human trafficking. Currently, there are four global indices evaluating countries’ enforcement of anti-trafficking policies. These measures, in no particular order, are:

• Tier Rankings from Trafficking in Persons Report (hereafter “TIP”) developed by the US Department of State;
• 3P Anti-Trafficking Policy Index developed by Cho and published by the German Institute for Economic Research;
• Trafficking Scale developed by Hudson et al. (2012);
• Government Response to Modern Slavery Index, which is a part of the Global Slavery Index developed by the Walk Free Foundation.

Despite providing the vast country and time coverage, these indices lack connection to the main concepts of human trafficking remaining a-theoretical. Also, researchers using these indices mostly omit to critically evaluate them: “only 3 of the 41 books questioned the basis for the State Department’s claims and estimates” (Weitzer 2015: 224). However, to be a reliable representation of anti-trafficking enforcement mechanisms , empirical measures need to be conceptually related at least to the factors emphasized by practitioners in order to enrich the quality of such measures. By using practitioner’s perspective and employing factors related to human trafficking proposed by NGOs, activists and human rights organizations, I propose the triangulated nexus of anti-trafficking enforcement —resulting from the three outlined factors related to human trafficking and hence hindering proper anti-trafficking enforcement. Analysis of missions, purposes, and reports of international organizations provides the key factors fueling human trafficking from practitioners’ points of view: crime, corruption, and physical rights violations. Thus, in Part I of the book, I discuss how proposed factors contribute to the development of main global hindrances to enforcement. Chapter 2 presents a closer examination of this nexus. Addressing the relationship between concepts included in the nexus and empirical data such as indices of anti-trafficking enforcement will help to explain how anti-trafficking enforcement works in essence and define which of existing indices represents the most reliable data source. The technique I use to define the best-performing index is called an external validity test. As the reader will see in Chapter 3, a test of external validity allows, “the generalizability of causal inferences to a broader set of cases” (Cook et al. 1979: 79). This test includes correlation analysis between the three global data sources on anti-trafficking enforcement and operationalized concepts of a triangulated nexus. As the results of the comparison will demonstrate, the Tier Rankings indicator is the most reliable measure of anti-trafficking enforcement. Based on this finding, the book then turns to explaining variation in the Tier Rankings data by running cross-national analyses and outlining country-level trends—both quite rare in the field of human trafficking research. Even though anti-trafficking enforcement data contains more information, comparative cross-national studies are still scarce in this field: most studies cover few countries or a region. No explanation of why the enforcement of legislative measures works differently in different countries and what might be the possible global determinants of effective anti-trafficking enforcement has been given so far. Many do not even approach the quantitative analysis in human trafficking research. Scholars tend to analyze human trafficking by accounting for one explanation mostly, which is not enough for such a large-scale phenomenon.

These gaps sparked an initial interest to write this book and to offer a new comparative and systematic analysis of countries’ anti-trafficking efforts. While the horrifying stories of trafficked survivors are gruesome and unimaginable, the ratio of prosecuted traffickers remains unexpectedly low. The cases in which traffickers were able to leave by only paying a fine, and after that, likely going back to the same lucrative business, are even harder to believe. Why do some countries still prioritize some people over others? Is it someone’s skin color or gender or social class that affects the decisions on trafficking cases? Are the bribes that traffickers are paying to the authorities merely helping them to avoid punishment? Why are global international agreements neglected, despite being adopted by a country when they are brought to the government’s attention? These questions are not only relevant for creating effective legislative mechanisms, but also for establishing preventive measures, which can be done if existing realities of the world are taken into account. Moreover, by addressing the root causes of human trafficking, this r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. The Data Challenge
• Part II. Macro-level Determinants of Anti-trafficking Enforcement
• Part III. Micro-level Foundations of Anti-trafficking Enforcement
• Part IV. Conclusion
• Back Matter