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Natural Disasters and Human Trafficking: Do Disasters Affect State Anti-Trafficking Performance?
Abstract
Despite the oft noted negative connection between natural disasters and human trafficking, no quantitative study has been performed. Natural disasters, like conflict, can destroy homes and the economic security of individuals forcing them to migrate and making them targets for traffickers. This article tests the link between a state's ability to address trafficking and natural disasters, testing the popular prediction that a state's capabilities will be strained as increased natural disasters occur thus producing a negative effect. The findings though demonstrate that states are actually more likely to perform better in their efforts to confront trafficking. I argue that this is because natural disasters actually strengthen and enhance the state, and particularly its security institutions, in responding to these events. I place these findings in the context of other recent quantitative studies of trafficking that have also produced contradictory results when compared with the field's qualitative studies.
... A few studies explored moderating factors, including the presence of war and conflict (Bales, 2021), gender inequality indicators (Cameron et al., 2021), the intensity of disasters (Boria, 2016), and government roles in post-disaster relief (Bowersox, 2018;Tu, 2018). However, these studies remain limited, vary in rigour, and have produced mixed findings. ...
... However, these studies remain limited, vary in rigour, and have produced mixed findings. For example, Tu (2018) did not find that the Quality of Government moderated the impact of natural disasters on trafficking outflows, while another study suggested that countries with more natural disasters were more likely to meet their responsibilities under the Palermo Protocol (Bowersox, 2018). Despite variations in methodologies, these contrasting results highlight the need for further research. ...
Natural disasters have increased in frequency and severity in recent years. Emerging research also suggests that natural disasters increase the risk of human trafficking. This confluence of phenomena makes it critically important to better prepare communities for preventing and responding to human trafficking during and after a natural disaster. Yet, there is no available synthesis of the extant research to inform these preparations. The present scoping review aims to fill this gap by outlining the existing literature on the nexus of disasters and human trafficking. The review follows the Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis—Scoping Review guidelines. Sources were identified through manual reference checking and in four databases: PubMed, Web of Science, APA PsychINFO, and EBSCO Discovery Service. In total, 46 sources met the inclusion criteria, that is, they focused on the nexus between human trafficking and natural disasters, demonstrated scientific rigor, and were published after 2000 and in English. Overall, the reviewed literature provided initial evidence on the association between natural disasters occurrences and increases in national and transnational human trafficking activity, understanding of the compounding vulnerabilities conducive to trafficking following disasters, and recommendations for the prevention and response to human trafficking in the wake of disasters. Future studies should evaluate prevention initiatives, including awareness campaigns and interventions that mitigate trafficking vulnerabilities. In practice, it is crucial to integrate anti-trafficking efforts into disaster relief protocols, empower vulnerable populations, and advocate for enhanced legal protections for displaced and migrant individuals.
... It is considered that disasters positively and significantly affect human trafficking. Disasters negatively affect economic outcomes, providing a mechanism by which they indirectly affect trafficking (Boria & Anukriti, 2016;Bowersox, 2018;Mbakogu, 2021). ...
Green criminology is a multidisciplinary field that seeks to explain the relationship between crime and geography. Bangladeshi criminologists and crime preventionists are increasingly conscious of crime-location relationships. This study aims to explore with a new eye the lifestyle of the people of haor areas to find out the root causes of crimes and the challenges of policing in haors areas as well. This study is conducted based on the qualitative approach. The study employed an in-depth interview strategy and focus group discussions (FGDs) to gather information. The findings of the study reveal that the main causes for crime in hoar areas include economic insolvency, lack of education, detached communication system, lack of steady employment, lack of adequate land survey, and pedigree contention within families. The result also shows that the police of hoar areas face difficulties in performing their duties due to poor communication, lack of manpower, political influence, inadequate logistics, and modern weapons. It is essential to study this topic to identify the relationship between geography and crime, which will help to control the crime rate in hoar areas through an effective and modern policing system.
... Each member state's type of THB (as an origin, transit, and/or destination country) is also controlled for since states may be predisposed to experience THB as a source, transit, or destination country based on their wealth and inequality levels (Frank, 2013a(Frank, , 2013b. And country-specific characteristics, like GDP per capita and inflation, were included to account for how countries with more resources and a stronger economy may have greater state capacity in anti-THB efforts or may be better at detecting THB victims (Bowersox, 2018;Jakobsson & Kotsadam, 2013). Dummy variables for each year and country were included to control for time and place fixed effects. ...
Trafficking in human beings (THB) is a widespread, transnational issue in the European Union (EU). Member states act as source, transit, and destination countries for intra-EU trafficking, in addition to being a major destination region for external THB victims. This study presents a new dataset of THB victims observed in each EU member state per year and by type of exploitation going back as far as 2001 and employs exact matching methods to test the link between different prostitution policies and Roma secondary education attainment rates on observed THB victimization. The paper also builds off previous literature to compare how different legal prostitution models and THB supply factors are expected to influence various types of THB. The results indicate that legalized prostitution and lower educational attainment among the Roma community increase observed THB victimization, especially THB for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The paper does not find that the Swedish model significantly increases or decreases observed THB victimization. In demonstrating how matching methods can be utilized to uncover policy patterns in THB outcomes, this study provides a blueprint for how other hidden phenomena, such as corruption or migration, can be robustly and empirically tested.
... Drolet et al. (2015) also maintain that "following a disaster, young girls are particularly vulnerable to being withdrawn from education to assist with the workload, to forced child marriages, and to trafficking" (p. 438), whereas Bowersox (2018), having analysed statistics of governmental anti-trafficking measures from 2001 to 2008, concludes that "states are actually more likely to improve their performance in relation to combating trafficking" (p. 202) in the aftermath of a disaster. ...
Bystanders are often the first to respond to disasters and, for this reason,
Community-Based Disaster Response Teams (CBDRTs) should be established
in vulnerable communities. The literature review examines Disaster Risk
Reduction initiatives and identifies that there is little information available
regarding strategies and training curriculum that could be used to establish and
maintain CBDRTs in developing nations and with vulnerable groups. The three
research questions for this investigation ask how CBDRT courses could be
adapted for these communities, what topics and activities would be most useful
for such training, and how the teams could be established and maintained. The
research objectives are to identify strategies that could be used to train CBDRT
groups in these contexts, to propose an outline for a basic training course, and
to describe techniques that could contribute to the sustainability of these teams.
Research was conducted with CBDRTs in developing nations using a mixed
methods methodology with the United States Federal Emergency Management
Agency’s (FEMA) Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programme
being employed as a case study. Quantitative data was obtained from a
questionnaire completed by CERT course graduates, and qualitative
information was acquired from key informant interviews. After a review of the
CERT programme that discusses its history, curriculum, success stories, and
potential pitfalls, the data collected is presented through statistical analysis of
the questionnaire replies and thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.
Suggested CBDRT training strategies are creating courses for adolescents,
modifying the material for non-literate learners, and providing additional
practical activities. Recommendations for establishing programmes include
developing teams for young people, cooperating with Community-Based
Organisations to solve existing problems, and offering CBDRT training in the
post-disaster environment. Techniques for maintaining the teams involve
developing leadership, creating support networks, and cultivating partnerships
with local authorities. The final conclusion is that the CERT model could be
used as the basis for an international CBDRT training programme, although it
would require adaption of the course content and presentation style.
... Drolet et al. (2015) also maintain that "following a disaster, young girls are particularly vulnerable to being withdrawn from education to assist with the workload, to forced child marriages, and to trafficking" (p. 438), whereas Bowersox (2018), having analysed statistics of governmental anti-trafficking measures from 2001 to 2008, concludes that "states are actually more likely to improve their performance in relation to combating trafficking" (p. 202) in the aftermath of a disaster. ...
Bystanders are often the first to respond to disasters and, for this reason, Community-Based Disaster Response Teams (CBDRTs) should be established in vulnerable communities. The literature review examines Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives and identifies that there is little information available regarding strategies and training curriculum that could be used to establish and maintain CBDRTs in developing nations and with vulnerable groups. The three research questions for this investigation ask how CBDRT courses could be adapted for these communities, what topics and activities would be most useful for such training, and how the teams could be established and maintained. The research objectives are to identify strategies that could be used to train CBDRT groups in these contexts, to propose an outline for a basic training course, and to describe techniques that could contribute to the sustainability of these teams. Research was conducted with CBDRTs in developing nations using a mixed methods methodology with the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programme being employed as a case study. Quantitative data was obtained from a questionnaire completed by CERT course graduates, and qualitative information was acquired from key informant interviews. After a review of the CERT programme that discusses its history, curriculum, success stories, and potential pitfalls, the data collected is presented through statistical analysis of the questionnaire replies and thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. Suggested CBDRT training strategies are creating courses for adolescents, modifying the material for non-literate learners, and providing additional practical activities. Recommendations for establishing programmes include developing teams for young people, cooperating with Community-Based Organisations to solve existing problems, and offering CBDRT training in the post-disaster environment. Techniques for maintaining the teams involve developing leadership, creating support networks, and cultivating partnerships with local authorities. The final conclusion is that the CERT model could be used as the basis for an international CBDRT training programme, although it would require adaption of the course content and presentation style. i
... To this end, Bowersox (2018) put the blame of migration for human trafficking largely due to natural disasters. This natural disaster such as conflict destroys not only individual security but also that of economic security of a family. ...
Previous research suggests that sex traffickers may take advantage of vulnerable populations in the aftermath of disasters caused by natural hazards. Despite the amplification of vulnerabilities in the wake of such events and the increased likelihood of sex traffickers exploiting them, there is limited empirical evidence to show such a connection. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to answer the following research question: what is the relationship between hurricanes and online advertisements potentially linked to sex trafficking? Hurricane Laura (a Category 4 hurricane that occurred between 20 and 29 August 2020) serves as a case study and data are scraped from Escort Index, an aggregator of popular multi‐service adult entertainment platforms in the United States. The results show a significant negative relationship between Hurricane Laura and the number of online sex advertisements potentially linked to human trafficking. The study offers three alternative explanations for this finding and concludes by outlining additional areas of research on this important topic.
While human trafficking in its different forms has received growing recognition, currently there is an absence of research providing empirical evidence on the potential impact of COVID-19. COVID-19 and its related challenges provide a lens through which the vulnerability and complexities inherent in human trafficking can be further ascertained and analysed. This article explores challenges encountered by key stakeholders primarily operating in the field of countering human trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation across Europe. These challenges are categorised as increased vulnerability to human trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation; the impact on services and support; and limitations on professional duties. A qualitative method involving sixty-five semi-structured interviews was employed to capture the on-the-ground experiences of a diverse cohort of stakeholders active during the pandemic.
Climate change and climate-induced migration heighten existing vulnerabilities
of slavery. Drivers of vulnerability to modern slavery are complex and impacted by many
layers of risk. While several socio-economic, political, cultural and institutional risks shape
vulnerability, they are increasingly considered to be made worse by climate change impacts
and environmental degradation.
Thailand’s flood of 2011 was devastating for the communities and inhabitants of the country, affecting approximately 13 million people and causing damages totaling THB 1.43 trillion (46.5 billion USD). The presence of a natural hazards disaster such as this can magnify individuals’ vulnerability to human trafficking, or mitigate it depending on the disaster risk reduction practices of the surrounding community. The Sendai Framework is the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s international framework for these situations, outlining targets and priorities for action to reduce negative outcomes, such as trafficking, from natural events. This study aimed to understand how a disaster risk reduction and preparedness lens, based on the Sendai Framework, in the context of the humanitarian response to this 2011 flood, could inform human trafficking prevention efforts for future disasters. Qualitative methodology, utilizing a content analysis approach, was employed. It was found that migrant workers and children were at the greatest risk for trafficking, and resiliency efforts by communities and families, in conjunction with coordinated initiatives by NGOs and the government, were essential in preserving individuals’ well-being. Further, the Sendai Framework is a promising tool to address these areas of disaster response in which the windows of opportunity for traffickers can be closed and those at high trafficking risk can be protected. As disasters continue to occur, there remains a strong need to bring forth a more systematic disaster risk reduction and resilience-enhancing approach to trafficking prevention.
In this commentary paper, the current state of research on the tightly connected and bi-directional relationships among modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change is critically assessed and reviewed. An emerging branch of research has begun to conceptualize linkages between slavery and environmental change. Responding to a gap in the extant literature, this paper synthesizes and makes sense of this emerging research base and proposes a future research agenda for exploring the slavery–environment nexus. Through an exploration of 19 key texts which explicitly examine the relationship between slavery and environmental change, spanning across diverse disciplines and spatial scales, we draw out two key arguments that can be adopted in proposing a future research agenda. Firstly, we identify the sectoral emergence of the nexus, forming primarily around four key sectors: (i) Fisheries, (ii) Fields, (iii) Forests and (iv) Factories. The review suggests that a sufficient exploration of slavery–environment linkages needs to transverse these sectoral boundaries. Secondly, the paper highlights the bi-directional interactions among modern slavery, climate change and environmental degradation. Accordingly, we argue for a holistic lens which explores how slavery practices and environmental change are continually shaping one another. Existing research has provided initial understandings of the relationship among modern slavery, environmental destruction and climate change. However, there remains considerable scope for the connections between the three to be further interrogated and unpacked. Based on the review, the paper sets out three key research agendas, highlighting the need to move beyond a spatially and sectorally confined exploration of slavery–environment interactions towards an integrated and sophisticated interrogation of the nexus. Additionally, we propose the future examination of the deep underlying drivers of slavery–environment interactions and to situate these within contemporary capitalist social and economic relations.
We develop an index measuring the three main dimensions – prosecution, protection, and prevention – of the anti-trafficking policies of the governments of up to 180 countries over the 2000−2010 period. Overall, developed countries perform better than the rest of the world; compliance with prosecution policy is highest, while governmental efforts to protect victims of human trafficking remain weakest. We employ the new indices to investigate which factors determine anti-trafficking policies. We find that compliance with anti-trafficking policies significantly decreases with corruption and is higher in countries that also respect the rights of women. We also find some tentative evidence for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking policies.
This study aims to identify robust push and pull factors of human trafficking. I test for the robustness of 70 push and 63 pull factors suggested in the literature. In doing so, I employ an extreme bound analysis, running more than two million regressions with all possible combinations of variables for up to 153 countries during the period of 1995–2010. My results show that crime prevalence robustly explains human trafficking both in destination and origin countries. Income level also has a robust impact, suggesting that the cause of human trafficking shares that of economic migration. Law enforcement matters more in origin countries than destination countries. Interestingly, a very low level of gender equality may have constraining effects on human trafficking outflow, possibly because gender discrimination limits female mobility that is necessary for the occurrence of human trafficking.
Most of the traditional methods of collecting data cannot be applied to new forms of crime such as trafficking in human beings. The present article examines the qualitative information in the database of the Global Programme against Trafficking in Human Beings of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The database includes information about all aspects of such trafficking. The data collected are comparable between countries and regions and are divided into three main sections: country reports, characteristics of the victims of such trafficking and of the traffickers and trafficking routes. The article illustrates the complexity of the data entry process. Analysis of the data confirms that trafficking in human beings is a gender-specific phenomenon, a sad manifestation of the rampant violence against women and girls. The results may be used as a basis for setting priorities for international cooperation and for gaining a deeper understanding of the profile of a given country.
This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in international relations is more aptly described as one of ‘accommodation’ through issue linkage than a process of persuasion.
While it is universally recognized that states are responsible for human rights conditions in their jurisdictions, it is less often noticed that this responsibility has two dimensions, one normative and one empirical. Normatively, most people agree that states ought to prevent human rights abuses. Empirically, however, states may not always be able to do so. In weak and failing states, agency loss and the inability to police effectively can lead to abuses by private individuals and rogue agents of the state. Thus, on balance, weak states typically have worse human rights records than strong ones. This is demonstrated by a global time-series cross-section analysis showing that indicators of state weakness — low tax revenues, corruption, and lack of law and order — all have a negative impact on human rights to personal security. The effect differs for different kinds of rights. Extrajudicial killings are highly sensitive to state capacity, while political imprisonment is more sensitive to democracy. Overall, however, it appears that the totalitarian model of human rights abuse by excessively strong states applies to a restricted set of cases. The more common problem is states that cannot effectively protect human rights. We must take state failure seriously when thinking about the causes of — and remedies for — human rights abuse.
In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battle-deaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.
We develop a new index measuring governments’ anti-trafficking policies for up to 180 countries over the 2000-2010 period. We assess a country’s level of compliance in the three main dimensions of anti-trafficking policies – prosecution, protection and prevention. The results show that compliance with prosecution policy is highest, while governmental efforts to protect victims of human trafficking remain weakest. Overall, developed countries perform better than the rest of the world. We employ the new indices to investigate what determines anti-trafficking policies. We find that compliance with anti-trafficking policies significantly decreases with corruption and is higher in countries that also respect the rights of women. We also find some tentative evidence for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking policies.
While there is a growing econometrics literature on the modeling of conflict and the interactions with trade, there has been relatively little evidence modeling the interregional migration behavior of individuals internally displaced by conflicts. The current article models the flows of households forced to leave their residence because of violent conflicts in Colombia. Results shed light on the main determinants of what we call journey to safety. Violence appears to be one of the most relevant pushing effects together with the absence of institutions and the dissatisfaction with the provision of basic needs. Furthermore, for regions with extreme violence levels, individuals appear to be willing to relocate to more distant locations. On the destination side, most populated regions are more attractive as well as areas with a sufficient level of fulfillment of basic needs.
Ethnic conflicts and their links to international human trafficking have recently received a surge in international attention. It appears that ethnic conflicts exacerbate the internal displacement of individuals from networks of family and community, and their access to economic and social safety nets. These same individuals are then vulnerable to being trafficked by the hopes of better economic prospects elsewhere. In this paper, we empirically examine this link between ethnic fragmentation, conflicts, internally displaced persons (IDPs), refugees and international trafficking, making use of a novel dataset of international trafficking. We conduct a direct estimation, which highlights the ultimate impact of ethnic fragmentation and conflict on international trafficking through internal and international displacements.
This article unpacks two constructions of human trafficking: as a security threat and as a humanitarian problem. Restricting its focus to trafficking of women for the sex industry, the article highlights the double identification of these women as illegal migrants and victims, prostitutes and suffering bodies. How are these schizophrenic identifications possible? An analysis of the security and humanitarian articulations as governmental interventions in Michel Foucault's sense of the term locates a perverse continuity. As the bodies in pain governed by a 'politics of pity' metamorphose into psychological cases to be governed by risk technologies within a 'politics of risk', the humanitarian and security interventions are shown to be in no way mutually exclusive.
Natural disasters do not affect people equally. In fact, a vulnerability approach to disasters would suggest that inequalities in exposure and sensitivity to risk as well as inequalities in access to resources, capabilities and opportunities systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, rendering them more vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. In this article we address the specific vulnerability of girls and women with respect to mortality from natural disasters and their aftermath. Biological and physiological differences between the sexes are unlikely to explain large-scale gender differences in mortality rates. Social norms and role behavior provide some further explanation, but what is likely to matter most is the everyday socio-economic status of women. We analyze the effect of disaster strength and its interaction with the socio-economic status of women on the change in the gender gap in life expectancy in a sample of up to 141 countries over the period 1981 to 2002. We find, first, that natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, natural disasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier age than men. Since female life expectancy is generally higher than that of males, for most countries natural disasters narrow the gender gap in life expectancy. Second, the stronger the disaster (as approximated by the number of people killed relative to population size), the stronger this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. That is, major calamities lead to more severe impacts on female life expectancy (relative to that of males) than smaller disasters. Third, the higher women’s socio-economic status, the weaker this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. In other words, taken together our results show that it is the socially constructed gender-specific vulnerability of females built into everyday socio-economic patterns that lead to the relatively higher female disaster mortality rates compared to men.
Most combatants in armed conflict are men, so naturally men are the major direct victims of military operations. Yet armed conflicts have important indirect negative consequences on agriculture, infrastructure, public health provision, and social order. These indirect consequences are often overlooked and underappreciated. They also affect women arguably more so than men. This article provides the first rigorous analysis of the impact of armed conflict on female life expectancy relative to male. We find that over the entire conflict period, interstate and civil wars on average affect women more adversely than men. In peacetime, women typically live longer than men. Hence, armed conflict tends to decrease the gap between female and male life expectancy. For civil wars, we also find that ethnic wars and wars in failed states are much more damaging to women than other civil wars. Our findings challenge policymakers as well as international and humanitarian organizations to develop policies that tackle the large indirect and long-term negative health impacts of armed conflicts.Equal authorship. We are grateful for helpful suggestions by Andrew Mack, H vard Hegre, David Hugh-Jones, Lisa Martin, and the anonymous referees. Eric Neumayer acknowledges financial assistance from the Leverhulme Trust and Thomas Pl mper financial assistance by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Program (CIT-2-CT-2004-506084). Data and do-files to generate the results are available on request.
This is a book review of the 2nd edition of Wisner et al. At Risk: natural hazards, people's vulnerability and disasters (Routledge 2004)
Recent literature has suggested that a state’s being awarded the title of host for the Olympics or FIFA’s World Cup can increase bilateral trade flows (Rose & Spiegel, 2011) and their political status (Rhamey & Early, 2013). Another potential side effect of these large-scale events is the increase in sex tourism and human trafficking. The influx of visitors to a host state is thought to increase demand on the local sex industry. Similarly, the need to build new stadia and infrastructure arguably increases the likelihood that trafficked labor will be utilized. This article examines the record of host states in addressing human trafficking as compared to a global sample. The findings suggest that international sporting event hosts (FIFA World Cup and Olympics) are positively affected by these events when it comes to prosecuting human traffickers, but Olympic states are negatively affected in the dimension of trafficking prevention. This suggests that the Olympics produce varying demands on a state that can increase the demand for trafficked individuals.
How does transnational legal order emerge, develop, and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalizing human trafficking in international, as well as regional and domestic, law. Our chapter tries to explain this process of norm convergence. We hypothesize that swift convergence on norms against human trafficking and on a particular legal solution – criminalization – is the result of a specific set of conditions related to globalization and the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. We argue that a broad coalition of states had much to gain by choosing a prosecutorial model over one that makes human rights or victim protection its top priority. We explore the framing of human trafficking through computerized textual analysis of United Nations resolutions – the central forum for debates over the nature of human trafficking and what to do about it. We look for evidence of how the framing of human trafficking has shifted over time, and of how the normative pressure as reflected in these documents has waxed and waned. We will argue that a binding legal instrument became possible because of the normative convergence solidified by linking human trafficking to transnational crime more generally.
This book examines all forms of human trafficking globally, revealing the operations of the trafficking business and the nature of the traffickers themselves. Using a historical and comparative perspective, it demonstrates that there is more than one business model of human trafficking and that there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. Drawing on a wide body of academic research – actual prosecuted cases, diverse reports, and field work and interviews conducted by the author over the last sixteen years in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the former socialist countries – Louise Shelley concludes that human trafficking will grow in the twenty-first century as a result of economic and demographic inequalities in the world, the rise of conflicts, and possibly global climate change. Coordinated efforts of government, civil society, the business community, multilateral organizations, and the media are needed to stem its growth.
Women, Politics, and Power provides a clear and detailed introduction to womens political representation across a wide range of countries and regions. Using broad statistical overviews and detailed case-study accounts, authors Pamela Paxton and Melanie Hughes document both historical trends and the contemporary state of womens political strength across diverse countries. There is simply no other book that offers such a thorough and multidisciplinary synthesis of research on womens political power from around the world. © 2007 by Pine Forge Press, an Imprint of Sage Publications, Inc.
According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.
Human trafficking, broadly defined as the forced movement of individuals within and between nation–state boundaries, is a local, national, and transnational phenomenon that has captured the public and scholarly imaginary in the past decade. This article takes to task situating the disparate definitions, meanings, and debates within contemporary literatures on trafficking. Focusing on the United States, this article traces key trafficking terminologies like “smuggling,” “modern day slavery,” and “sexual slavery.” Herein I aim to make theoretic sense of scholarly interventions made on behalf of trafficked persons and to examine the scholarly and political efficacy of trafficking discourses.
The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices, can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.
A connection between disasters and political unrest has often been suggested, but only case studies/anecdotes have been offered as evidence. To test statistically for a disaster-political unrest relationship, a causal model is developed that posits a direct and positive linkage between disaster severity and ensuing levels of political unrest. The model further specifies that increased levels of development, income equality, and regime repressiveness dampen post-disaster political unrest. Using a time-series cross-section method and data from 12 countries suffering major disasters between 1966 and 1980, Poisson regression results strongly corroborate the model. The exception is income equality, which has the opposite of the originally hypothesized effect.
Nine years after the passage of federal anti-trafficking legislation in the United States, fewer incidents of trafficking have been identified than original estimates of the problem predicted. Some scholars and commentators suggest that changes in the public framing of the trafficking problem aimed at advancing particular agendas are to blame. Yet no studies to date had measured such a reframing process and its attendant consequences. Using a natural history of social problems model (Spector & Kitsuse, 1973) as the theoretical framework to examine the framing of trafficking, this study analyzed text from U.S. newspaper articles about human trafficking from 1990 to 2006. Findings suggest the public framing of human trafficking has changed over time corresponding with the adoption of policies focused on national security and the identification, apprehension, and criminal prosecution of trafficking perpetrators. Challenges following such definitional shifts are discussed.
Because freedom of choice and economic gain are at the heart of productivity, human trafficking impedes national and international economic growth. Within the next 10 years, crime experts expect human trafficking to surpass drug and arms trafficking in its incidence, cost to human well-being, and profitability to criminals (Schauer and Wheaton, 2006: 164–165). The loss of agency from human trafficking as well as from modern slavery is the result of human vulnerability (Bales, 2000: 15). As people become vulnerable to exploitation and businesses continually seek the lowest-cost labour sources, trafficking human beings generates profit and a market for human trafficking is created.
This paper presents an economic model of human trafficking that encompasses all known economic factors that affect human trafficking both across and within national borders. We envision human trafficking as a monopolistically competitive industry in which traffickers act as intermediaries between vulnerable individuals and employers by supplying differentiated products to employers. In the human trafficking market, the consumers are employers of trafficked labour and the products are human beings. Using a rational-choice framework of human trafficking we explain the social situations that shape relocation and working decisions of vulnerable populations leading to human trafficking, the impetus for being a trafficker, and the decisions by employers of trafficked individuals. The goal of this paper is to provide a common ground upon which policymakers and researchers can collaborate to decrease the incidence of trafficking in humans.
During the last few decades, human dynamics, institutional change, political relations, and the natural environment have become successively more intertwined. While the increased global economic integration, global forms of governance, globally inter-linked social and environmental developments are often referred to as "globalisation," there is no unanimously-agreed upon definition of the term. Depending on the researcher or commentator, it can mean, among other things, the growing integration of markets and nation-states, receding geographical constraints on social and cultural arrangements, the increased dissemination of ideas and technologies, the threat to national sovereignty by trans-national actors; or the transformation of the economic, political and cultural foundations of societies. Regardless of perspective, globalisation permeates our economic, political, and social institutions to a profound degree. Recently, the issue of "sustainability" has reached the mainstream: are the forces of globalisation ultimately contributing to growth and opportunity—or to destruction and chaos? Against the chorus of globalisation’s proponents and detractors, the authors propose an approach for measuring globalisation and its consequences. Undertaking a comprehensive review of the literature on globalisation and using data from the MGI and KOF indices, the authors build a framework for defining globalisation and analyzing the relationships among economic, political, and social variables. In particular, they apply the methodology to analyze the effects of globalisation on tax policy, government spending, economic growth, inequality, union power, and the natural environment and consider additional avenues for research, analysis, and decision making. In the process, they hope that by introducing objective measures to enhance our insight into the functioning of the complex global system.
The study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions: economic integration, social integration, and political integration. Using panel data for 123 countries in 1970-2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub-indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth. As the results show, globalization indeed promotes growth. The dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries. Although less robustly, information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect.
An editorial overview of a special double issue of this journal devoted to Women in migration, each article of which is abstracted separately. The extent of and studies of women's migration are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the integration of independent long-distance migrants into the labour force of advanced capitalist countries, and the gains and losses to women that arise are assessed. -W.T.S.Gould Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France.
For many years experimental observations have raised questions about the rationality of economic agents--for example, the Allais Paradox or the Equity Premium Puzzle. The problem is a narrow notion of rationality that disregards fear. This article extends the notion of rationality with new axioms of choice under uncertainty and the decision criteria they imply (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257-321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). In the absence of catastrophes, the old and the new approach coincide, and both lead to standard expected utility. A sharp difference emerges when facing rare events with important consequences, or catastrophes. Theorem 1 establishes that a classic axiom of choice under uncertainty - Arrow's Monotone Continuity axiom, or its relatives introduced by DeGroot, Villegas, Hernstein and Milnor - postulate rational behavior that is [`]insensitive' to rare events as defined in (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257-321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). Theorem 2 replaces this axiom with another that allows extreme responses to extreme events, and characterizes the implied decision criteria as a combination of expected utility with extremal responses. Theorems 1 and 2 offer a new understanding of rationality consistent with previously unexplained observations about decisions involving rare and catastrophic events, decisions involving fear, the Equity Premium Puzzle, [`]jump di
Nepal Quake Survivors Face Threat from Human Traffickers Supplying Sex Trade
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Burke, J.
2015
"Nepal Quake Survivors Face Threat from Human Traffickers Supplying Sex Trade", The Guardian. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/nepal-quake-survivors-face-threatfrom-human-traffickers-supplying-sex-trade
Putting women in their place
- M Caprioli
- V M Hudson
- R Mcdermott
- C Emmett
- B Ballif-Spanvill
Caprioli, M., V.M. Hudson, R. McDermott, C. Emmett, and B. Ballif-Spanvill
2007
"Putting women in their place", Baker Center Journal of Applied Public Policy, 1(1): 12-22.
EM-DAT: The CRED/OFDA International Disaster Database
- Guha-Sapir
Nepal Earthquake of 2015
- Rafferty J.P.
The CIRI Human Rights Dataset
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- D L Richards
- C K Clay
Cingranelli, D.L., D.L. Richards, and C.K. Clay
2014
"The CIRI Human Rights Dataset." http://www.humanrightsdata.com.
Humanitarian Crises and Migration: Causes, Consequences, and Responses
- J. McAdam
The Quality of Government Standard Data Set
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- S Dahlber
- F Holmber B.Rothstein
- Hartmann
- Svensson
Human Trafficking, Human Security, and the Balkans
- H. R. Reich Friman
- S. Reich
Human Trafficking and Human Security
- A. Jonsson
Human Trafficking and Human Security
- T. Makarenko
Humanitarian Crises and Migration: Causes, Consequences, and Responses
- E. Ferris
Human security and human trafficking
- L Shelley
Shelley, L.
2009
"Human security and human trafficking", in A. Jonsson (Ed.), Human Trafficking and Human
Security, Routledge, New York, NY: 10-25.
Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars
- M Small
- J D Singer
Small, M., and J.D. Singer
1982
Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.
Human trafficking indicators
- R W Frank
Frank, R. W.
2013
"Human trafficking indicators, 2000 -2011: a new dataset". University of Sydney. URL: http://
ssrn.com/abstract=2314157
Research into human trafficking: issues and problems
- A Dinicola
DiNicola, A.
2007
"Research into human trafficking: issues and problems", in M. Lee (Ed.), Human Trafficking, Willan Publishing, Portland, OR: 49-72.
Information on the coding and construct of this data, as well as its disaggregated constituent parts, are available from the PRS Group via purchase
- Teorell
- Dahlber
- Holmber
- Hartmann Rothstein
Information on the coding and construct of this data, as well as its disaggregated constituent parts, are available from the PRS Group via purchase (see: https://www.prsgroup.com/about-us/our-two-methodologies/ic
rg). The combined data measure though is available via the QOG Institute (Teorell, Dahlber, Holmber,
Rothstein, Hartmann, and Svensson, 2015).
International Sporting Events and Human Trafficking: Effects of Mega-Events on a State's Capacity to Address Human Trafficking
- P Blaikie
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- B Wisner
- Disasters
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Blaikie, P., T. Cannon, I. Davis, and B. Wisner
1994
At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters, Routledge, New York, NY.
Bowersox, Z.
2016
"International Sporting Events and Human Trafficking: Effects of Mega-Events on a State's Capacity to Address Human Trafficking", Journal of Human Trafficking, 2(3): 201-220.