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Human trafficking: contexts and connections to conventional crime

Criminology has faced new challenges in understanding and describing crime over the past two decades. Criminological theory, data and methods have been challenged by the ‘emergence’ of new crime types. Many of these emerging types of crime involve group behavior in some form or another. Explaining how groups operate has been a fundamental challenge to much of this research. This dilemma certainly has been a part of the attempt to address gang crime, which has a long history in the discipline. But there are other group crimes that have received increased attention from the field. For example, criminologists had paid little attention to the study of terrorism, racialization and extremism until 11 September 2001. But as Rosenfeld noted (2004), criminological theory and methods provided a framework to begin to understand such behavior. Drug smuggling, money laundering, organized crime and crimes committed through the use of the internet represent other such emergent crime types. But perhaps no crime has been more difficult to study and explain for criminologists than human trafficking.While traditional methods, measures and theories in criminology were not suitable for understanding human trafficking, there was good work being done in social work, history and political science on this topic. After all, human trafficking – particularly as slavery and the forced re-settlement of people – has a long history. The study of human trafficking is hindered by its hidden nature. In one sense, the study of all crime is plagued by a lack of fully enumerated data, thus frequent reference is made to the ‘dark figure of crime,’ the inability to know how much crime there is. But this problem is exacerbated with group crime in general, and perhaps is more extreme for human trafficking specifically. Think of the Part I crimes; almost all reports of Part I crime are generated by victims. In the case of robbery, for example, the police receive reports of a robbery from a victim or a citizen who witnessed the crime, make an official report, and enter the available data. We know from the National Crime Victimization Survey data (NCVS) that even for violent crimes, less than one-half of all victimizations are reported to the police. But human trafficking is a crime that is under-reported for reasons beyond those that apply to robbery or assault. Offenders are organized to prevent victimizations from being ‘visible’ to citizens, work to prevent victims from reporting their victimization to the police, and the police themselves typically fail to see the victims as ‘true victims’ and often treat them as offenders. This is the first, and perhaps most significant problem for criminologists in addressing human trafficking, having good data. However, criminologists have a history of using self-reported data, data from agencies, data based on interviews and working through police data to correctly classify it. One of the key issues in understanding a ‘new’ crime type is the definition and measurement of that crime type. This is particularly important for human trafficking given its recent emergence on the criminological landscape. Fortunately, there is a foundation to build on, provided in large part through work done by Amy Farrell and her colleagues at Northeastern (Farrell and Fahy 2009; Farrell 2014; Farrell and Pfeffer 2014; Farrell,