Tackling Organized Crime and Human Trafficking

Dear Colleagues,

“The business of trafficking in people represents the juxtaposition between human desires and needs, and market demands, entrepreneurial spirit, and unscrupulousness, which has fueled a variety of organized crime” (Finckenauer, 2007). This leads to the question of whether human trafficking is a form of organized crime, or an example of a crime that is organized? Considering this question and the associated possibilities, in this Special Issue we wish to examine the current knowledge and understanding of this topic. To that end, we invite authors to consider numerous possible concerns, and pose other questions that they believe will shed further light on the overall issue.

Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What is the current state of our knowledge and understanding of the involvement of organized crime in human trafficking? What are the sources of this information? How reliable and valid are those sources?
• Is there any evidence of involvement in human trafficking by any of the traditional and best-known criminal organizations, e.g., Italian/Sicilian Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, Russian mafiya, Japanese Yakuza, Chinese triads, Central American maras, etc.?
• Who are the traffickers? How are they recruited and by whom? What is their relationship, if any, with the persons being trafficked? How are they organized? Is the organizational arrangement different for domestic vs. transnational trafficking?
• What is the relationship, if any, between persons engaged in human smuggling and those engaged in human trafficking? Are they organized differently? If so, how?
• How does the potential of organized crime involvement impact the nature of the investigation and prosecution of human trafficking cases?
• Is there any evidence that organized crime involvement in human trafficking has been intentionally hyped so as to bring more attention and greater, but perhaps undue, importance to the issue?

To address these questions, we welcome both original and empirical research, as well as works that compile and synthesize existing research literature with emphasis on the most current research.

Prof. Dr. James O. Finckenauer
Guest Editor

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