The Missing Link in Combating Human Trafficking

What the battle against human trafficking needs is more input from academia. That’s the highly informed view of Dr. David Rubens, executive director of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) in London, whose vision for solving complex world problems such as human trafficking involves bridging the gap between the academic world and the political world.

David Rubens

Source: David Rubens, used with permission

“Too often people in the political sphere are unaware of the rich work being done on the academic side,” says Rubens. Without the framework and methodology that academics can provide, he explains, political responses can end up being random and reactive—as he puts it, like“a dog snapping at flies.”

He has all the respect in the world for politicians, but even so, he contends that politicians and academicians could achieve greater results if they did more to take advantage of each other’s strengths.

The crime of human trafficking is taking place in virtually every city in the world, and often in the smaller towns and villages. Politicians decry it, but few have made much progress in combating it.

Rubens’ organization, ISRM, is working to grow and strengthen the links between the politicians, who work in the world of action, and the academics, who work in the world of thought. His organization operates through chapters in 31 countries, and regularly convenes meetings where representatives from both worlds get to learn from each other.

For example, Rubens says that, in combating trafficking, politicians can benefit by looking at it through the academics’ lens of rational choice theory. This theory holds that individuals use their self-interest to make choices that will provide them with the greatest benefit. When politicians study human trafficking using rational choice theory, they have both a methodology for understanding the problem and a way to know more about what is likely to work—and not work—in combating it.

Say a mayor is responding to her voter demands that she do something about trafficking in her area. If she looks at trafficking through the academic lenses of both rational choice theory and criminology, she’ll realize that a trafficker is making specific calculations in deciding to engage in this particular crime. Consciously or not, the trafficker will be calculating:

1. Ease of access.
2. Value
3. Likelihood of success.

When looking at ease of access, the mayor needs to consider who the vulnerable people are, how the traffickers access them, and what routes they use to bring them into the trafficking pipeline. That could be through false promises of employment; an escape from poverty (which means that many trafficked people might voluntarily offer themselves to traffickers, not realizing what their objective is), or though force and coercion (for example, in order to pay off debts that have escalated because of mounting interest rates).

When considering the payoff, the traffickers’ calculations will vary by geographic area. As one example of how large the payoff can be, in New York City, sex-trafficking just one girl can be worth a quarter of a million dollars a year to her trafficker. Sex trafficking is among the world’s most lucrative crimes.

As for likelihood of success, the trafficker almost certainly knows that his chances of paying a serious penalty for this crime are minuscule. A generally accepted estimate of the odds of a trafficker doing jail time in most countries is less than 1 in 100.

In view of the calculations of ease of access, value, and likelihood of success), the mayor might find the most practical lever for preventing trafficking is investing more in law enforcement. She can change the traffickers’ calculation that there’s a big payoff and little chance of paying a price.

The issue of human trafficking is complex, chaotic, and challenging. By sharing information and expertise, the ISRM is working to increase the interactions between those who have knowledge of possible answers and those who can put ideas into action.