Human Smuggling, Human Trafficking, and Exploitation in the Sex Industry

Abstract

Human trafficking is often confused with human smuggling. Both phenomena may be regarded as undesirable consequences of globalization. Smugglers as well as traffickers make use of other people’s desire to improve their lives by building up a better future elsewhere. Yet there are fundamental differences as well. Human smuggling primarily relates to illegal immigration and the violation of immigration laws. Human smugglers move people and provide a bridge between poor or dangerous countries and richer, safer ones. Some may have humanitarian motives to save political refugees or to help relatives or friends to build up a new life. Others unscrupulously abuse dependent illegal immigrants by demanding high prices and providing bad or even perilous travel arrangements. Usually the relationship between smugglers and smuggled persons ends after the transport to the country of destination. In human trafficking, the situation is different. Human trafficking often, but not necessarily, involves border crossing. After arrival, trafficked persons must produce profit for the traffickers. Their relationships with the traffickers, or with organizations or individuals who have paid for their delivery, are longer term, victim-exploiter relationships, in which the human rights of the victim are being abused (Kelly and Regan 2000). According to the trafficking definition in the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, using means like threat or force, deception, coercion, abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, with the purpose of exploitation (UN 2000, Article 3a). Many countries follow the aforementioned distinction between human smuggling and human trafficking in their national penal codes. However, in practice, these two phenomena can be difficult to distinguish and may be intertwined. Assisted illegal immigration may precede exploitation, as some smuggled illegal immigrants, who travel voluntarily to other countries, end up as trafficking victims in debt bondage and bad labor conditions only later on. Even the issue of mutual consent, common in human smuggling, is not always decisive in distinguishing between smuggling and trafficking (Herman 2006; Van Liempt and Doomernik 2006); trafficking also usually starts with a consensual agreement between the trafficker and the future victim (Andrees 2008). When individuals have agreed to come to another country to work in the sex industry or in other sectors, their fate may not become clear until after arrival, when they are gradually forced to do other work than they had agreed upon, or under very different circumstances than