About this Research Topic
To coincide with the United Nations World Day Against Trafficking in Persons 2023, Frontiers in Human Dynamics is launching a Research Topic to showcase the latest research in this area. This year, the theme of the UN day is "reach every victim of trafficking, leave no one behind."
Trafficking in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights. Subjects in conditions of vulnerability due to their legal status, poverty, limited access to education, healthcare, or decent work, discrimination, violence, or abuse, or coming from marginalized communities or countries that are experiencing humanitarian emergencies or conflicts, continue to represent the primary targets for traffickers. Trafficking is a crime that has maintained many of the same characteristics since the year 2000, the year of the adoption of UN Palermo ad hoc Additional Protocol Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, but it is also a dynamic phenomenon with a great ability to adapt to changes in the contexts in which it is rooted. The violent or fraudulent dynamics that characterize trafficking as it is defined in the UN Protocol tend to overlap and mix with movements of a different nature, giving rise to mixed mobility flows and complex human implications in which the voluntary choice to leave often gives way to overriding coercive conditions. We seek to understand how the changing patterns of irregular migration have affected the dynamics of trafficking and the patterns of vulnerability to trafficking.
The political narrative on trafficking as well as the response of many countries in terms of regulatory and policy instruments has often been instrumentally crossed with the accentuation of repressive norms in the area of countering irregular migration - prostitution tout court rather than its exploitation. The same cannot be said for other situations of subjugation as well as for protection of "victims," who increasingly seem to have to respond to clichés that eventually become “cages” rather than representing paths of valorization and re-appropriation of their own social capital and individual resources. However, the crystallization of stereotypical narratives on victims’ identities and features seems to affect the legal frameworks and their judicial implementation without embracing the actual complexity that range between diverse – and often overlapping – forms of exploitation and involves a broad variety of subject profiles.
In this Research Topic, we ask authors to write about trafficking in human beings using their knowledge and expertise but also keeping the discussion focused on how the mixed migration flows and the new international and national crises have shaped society, social change and political orientation on the matter. Globally, national responses, particularly in developing States, appear to be deteriorating also in terms of human rights duties of prevention and protection. It is evident in fact that in many States victims rely on “self-rescue” due to the lack in the anti-trafficking responses in protecting presumed and actual victims.
Understanding deeper concrete factors that have shaped trafficking in human beings as well as how trafficking has been determining the life of thousands of migrants around the world is the key focus of this Research Topic.
We aim to bring together a dynamic set of original manuscripts that problematize various aspects of trafficking in human beings as a phenomenon that produces and reproduces various forms of injustice, at social and economic level determining severe violations of human rights. The methodology used can be either quantitative or qualitative and in any case useful in understanding this broader goal.
Trafficking in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights. Subjects in conditions of vulnerability due to their legal status, poverty, limited access to education, healthcare, or decent work, discrimination, violence, or abuse, or coming from marginalized communities or countries that are experiencing humanitarian emergencies or conflicts, continue to represent the primary targets for traffickers. Trafficking is a crime that has maintained many of the same characteristics since the year 2000, the year of the adoption of UN Palermo ad hoc Additional Protocol Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, but it is also a dynamic phenomenon with a great ability to adapt to changes in the contexts in which it is rooted. The violent or fraudulent dynamics that characterize trafficking as it is defined in the UN Protocol tend to overlap and mix with movements of a different nature, giving rise to mixed mobility flows and complex human implications in which the voluntary choice to leave often gives way to overriding coercive conditions. We seek to understand how the changing patterns of irregular migration have affected the dynamics of trafficking and the patterns of vulnerability to trafficking.
The political narrative on trafficking as well as the response of many countries in terms of regulatory and policy instruments has often been instrumentally crossed with the accentuation of repressive norms in the area of countering irregular migration - prostitution tout court rather than its exploitation. The same cannot be said for other situations of subjugation as well as for protection of "victims," who increasingly seem to have to respond to clichés that eventually become “cages” rather than representing paths of valorization and re-appropriation of their own social capital and individual resources. However, the crystallization of stereotypical narratives on victims’ identities and features seems to affect the legal frameworks and their judicial implementation without embracing the actual complexity that range between diverse – and often overlapping – forms of exploitation and involves a broad variety of subject profiles.
In this Research Topic, we ask authors to write about trafficking in human beings using their knowledge and expertise but also keeping the discussion focused on how the mixed migration flows and the new international and national crises have shaped society, social change and political orientation on the matter. Globally, national responses, particularly in developing States, appear to be deteriorating also in terms of human rights duties of prevention and protection. It is evident in fact that in many States victims rely on “self-rescue” due to the lack in the anti-trafficking responses in protecting presumed and actual victims.
Understanding deeper concrete factors that have shaped trafficking in human beings as well as how trafficking has been determining the life of thousands of migrants around the world is the key focus of this Research Topic.
We aim to bring together a dynamic set of original manuscripts that problematize various aspects of trafficking in human beings as a phenomenon that produces and reproduces various forms of injustice, at social and economic level determining severe violations of human rights. The methodology used can be either quantitative or qualitative and in any case useful in understanding this broader goal.
Keywords: human trafficking, human rights, mixed migration flows, public policy, victims protection, victim agency, state duties
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
