The Business Side of Trafficking in Humans: Regional Contexts and Organized Crime

Abstract

Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective. By Louise Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 341 pp., $26.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-13087-5). In Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective , Louise Shelley sketches the regionally diverse practices and realities of human trafficking across Africa, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, and Russia. Although she focuses her attention primarily on human trafficking for sexual exploitation, she also addresses organ trafficking, labor trafficking, human smuggling, and the trafficking of children into adoption markets or for use as beggars or soldiers. Utilizing a comparative and historical perspective, Shelley's aim is to note the economic, social, and political context and consequences of human trafficking, examine the role of organized crime in trafficking enterprises, and reveal the various business models of human trafficking networks. Shelley demonstrates that human trafficking networks operate in such regionally diverse ways that any attempt to successfully eradicate them will require equally varied and context-specific solutions coordinated across a multitude of anti-trafficking actors. Part one includes two chapters that are especially well suited for those new to human trafficking as it outlines for the reader in very broad strokes the multiple and intersecting factors that have contributed to an increase in human trafficking since the 1980s. It also traces the social and political consequences of the trade in humans. Because the focus is on broadly sketching “the rise and costs of human …