Putting together the puzzle pieces: pathways to human trafficking

At the beginning of this book, I highlighted gaps in the human trafficking literature. This included a fragmented and underdeveloped body of theory, a lack of knowledge about how conditions of human trafficking combine and work together in unique ways, and a lack of geographic comparison in how those combinations may vary. In order to tackle these issues and better understand the multi-faceted and complex context of human trafficking, Chapter 2 outlined an integrated theoretical framework that drew from sociology and criminology in order to examine the social, economic, and political factors that link the local to the global. These factors were identified by the human trafficking literature and included: globalization, economic and gender inequality, corruption, conflict, and migration.

The integrated theories included institutional anomie theory, migration systems theory, and critical global feminism. Together these theories draw attention to the ways that historical processes of development and social change at a macro-level have impacted countries globalization and the dominance of the economy. These shifts have resulted in deepening inequalities and increasing rates of migration that work to make individuals vulnerable to trafficking. This framework was then applied across the geographic regions of Southeast Asia, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa through the use of set-theoretic MMR.

The fsQCA results detailed in Chapter 3 showcased four unique pathways to the initiation of human trafficking flows. Overall, the solutions are consistent with the theoretical framework, with fsQCA allowing for the illumination of distinctive combinations of conditions. The combination of gender inequality, corruption, low social expenditures, and absence of state fragility represents a unique combination (solution 1). Having both gender and income inequality alongside corruption appears important when countries have either globalization (solution 2) or economic dominance (solution 4). When both economic dominance and globalization are present together, income and gender inequality remain important, though corruption is replaced by low social expenditures (solution 3).

Importantly, these pathways shared substantial overlap with several of the seven pathways to high levels of out-migration. These results contribute to previous literature that found that trafficking and migration routes tend to overlap (Skeldon, 2002; Akee et al, 2010, Mahmoud and Trebesch, 2010; Akee et al, 2014).