Human trafficking for criminal exploitation: Effects suffered by victims in their passage through the criminal justice system
| Author | Carolina Villacampa,Núria Torres |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758018766161 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Human trafficking for criminal
exploitation: Effects suffered by
victims in their passage through
the criminal justice system
Carolina Villacampa
University of Lleida, Spain
Nu
´ria Torres
University Rovira i Virgili, Spain
Abstract
The victim-centred approach to human trafficking emphasises the protection of victims and
respect for their rights. For this protection to be effective, victims must be treated as such in their
passage through the criminal justice system, which can be complex with forms of trafficking that are
still relatively unknown, such as trafficking for criminal exploitation. Based on 37 in-depth inter-
views with Spanish practising criminal justice and victim assistance services professionals, this paper
analyses the effects that the failure to identify these types of victims has on them as they make their
way through the criminal justice system, paying particular attention to the degree to which the
aforementioned professionals recognise the principle of non-punishment.
Keywords
Human trafficking, criminal exploitation, victims, effects in criminal proceedings, principle of non-
punishment
Introduction
Human trafficking for criminal exploitation is one of the lesser-known types of this phenomenon. It
refers to trafficking carried out for the purpose of forcing the victims to perform either activities
that are considered unlawful or antisocial, such as begging or prostitution in places where it is
illegal, or those that directly constitute crimes, such as growing or producing marijuana or hashish,
Corresponding author:
Carolina Villacampa, Department of Public Law, University of Lleida, Jaume II 73, 25001 Lleida, Spain.
Email: cvillacampa@dpub.udl.cat
International Review of Victimology
2019, Vol. 25(1) 3–18
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DOI: 10.1177/0269758018766161
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acting as a drug mule, property-related street crime or credit card fraud. It includes the behaviours
of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring, receiving, exchanging or transferring control
over a person by the characteristic means of coercive, fraudulent or abusive trafficking for the
purpose of exploiting the victims by forcing them to engage in criminal activities (OSCE-Office of
the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, 2013).
The lack of interest in analysing this type of trafficking until recently can be explained by the
fact that trafficking for the purpose of criminal exploitation was not specifically included in the
definition of trafficking contained in Article 3 of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Con-
vention Against Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo Protocol) or Article 4 of the Council of
Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (Warsaw Convention), which
have been considered the most relevant treaties to determine the international concept of traffick-
ing. It was not until the adoption of Directive 2011/36/EU, on preventing and combating traffick-
ing in human beings and protecting its victims, that exploitation of criminal activities performed by
the victim was specifically included as a possible form of exploitation (Article 2.3).
Despite the lack of special attention given to this form of trafficking to date, its presence in the
technical reports issued on the matter has grown over time. It was not mentioned in the United
Nations report on trafficking in persons until the 2014 edition, when it was included amongst the
other forms of trafficking (UNODC, 2014). The same is true of the most recent Eurostat reports on
the subject (Eurostat-European Commission, 2013; 2015), where it generally accounts for a share
of no more than 17%of all identified victims. Other studies specifically designed to analyse
trafficking for criminal exploitation in Europe have shown how women imprisoned in the United
Kingdom or Spain for crimes such as illegal entry into the country or for acting as drug mules had
not been identified as trafficking victims (Hales and Gelsthorpe, 2012; Villacampa and Torres,
2014). In 2014, the report for the European RACE project, coordinated by Anti-Slavery Interna-
tional, offered proof of the existence of this type of trafficking in Great Britain, Ireland, the Czech
Republic and Holland (RACE, 2014) for the purpose of forcing the victims to commit crimes
related to illegal cannabis cultivation or property-related street crime.
Previous studies conducted with professionals had not focused on analysing their awareness of
the existence of this type of trafficking either. Knowledge of trafficking in general or specifically
of some of the better-known forms of this phenomenon has been analysed in research carried out in
the USA (Farrell, 2014; Farrell et al., 2014; 2015; Farrell and Pfeffer, 2014) and Canada (Kaye
et al., 2014) on criminal justice system professionals, in studies conducted with police officers
(Renzetti et al., 2015) and in those focused on child trafficking (Warria et al., 2015). None have
focused on the view such professionals have of trafficking for criminal exploitation or, specifi-
cally, on determining the adverse effects that the failure to identify victims of this type of traffick-
ing as such has on them as they make their way through the criminal justice system.
A common feature of the aforementioned analyses carried out with victims is that all of them
show how the victims of this form of trafficking are doubly victimised: first, by the process leading
to their enslavement itself and, second, by the system’s failure to identify them as victims. They are
usually considered offenders and held legally and cri minally liable for acts committed in the
exploitation stage of the trafficking process. Because of this failure to identify them as such, the
victims of this type of trafficking do not benefit from the victim-centred or holistic approach to
trafficking advocated in particular by the Warsaw Convention and Directive 2011/36/EU and are
thus heavily victimised from an institutional point of view. Since the essence of this approach
consists precisely in placing victims’ rights at the centre of the system, reinforcing victims’
4International Review of Victimology 25(1)
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