Introduction

As mentioned previously, research on human trafficking lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework developed specifically for understanding and studying human trafficking (Gożdziak, 2015; Kakar, 2017). In fact, one review of the human trafficking literature from 2000 to 2014 found that among over 1,000 scholarly articles on the topic, less than 5 percent were based in theory (Russell, 2018). Fundamentally, theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of human trafficking remains underdeveloped and fragmented across disciplines (Limoncelli, 2009a; Russell, 2018). This chapter explores how theory from the fields of criminology, migration studies, and feminism can be brought together for a unified explanation of human trafficking. This chapter will demonstrate the important role that theory integration can play, as it draws from multiple theories across disciplines. These theories must link the local and the global, as it is important to understand the role of processes of globalization, including socio-economic and socio-political factors, all while remaining sensitive to issues of agency, gender, and culture.

Specifically, the theories of institutional anomie, migration systems perspectives, and critical global feminism are brought together here to explain how international financial institutions and the policies of economic globalization they imposed onto nations contributed to the creation of conditions that increased migration, and concurrently, human trafficking. While it is the macro-level, or institutional, processes that are the focus of this book, the theoretical framework can be applied to micro-level, individual issues and other areas of human trafficking as well.

In this chapter, I first review each of the theories and offer an assessment of relevant empirical tests. Next, I outline the relationships between each of the theories in order to demonstrate how they create a unified framework. Here, I also evaluate the applicability of the theoretical frameworks for understanding human trafficking. Finally, I conclude by specifying how the theoretical framework will guide the analysis. This includes identifying the mechanisms involved in a causal chain leading to the outcome of human trafficking. Together these theories create a unifying framework that can answer the question of how global financial programs and policies have contributed to conditions within countries that have created human trafficking flows and how these pathways vary by geographic region.