̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - trafficking

Pangolin trafficking: Iceberg tip of Nigeria's illegal trade revealed

fpjl2 — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:59:15 +0000

New findings on Nigerian-linked pangolin seizures suggest that current global estimates for trafficking of the animal are far too small, say researchers.

Happy trafficking: how criminals profit from an iniquitous trade

amb206 — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

No-one knows how many human beings are trafficked each year. Reliable, comparable and up-to-date figures for this worldwide trade are notoriously hard to come by. By its nature, trafficking in human beings (THB) is a furtive and fast-changing phenomenon – and one that is both difficult and dangerous to research.

It is estimated that there exist between 21 million (International Labour Organization) and 31.4 million (United Nations) victims of trafficking and modern slavery. This shadowy trade overlaps and converges with the legitimate global economy, with illegal trades such as the internet’s ‘dark web’ and smuggling, as well as with illicit commerce – and, of course with terrorism.

Attempts to define THB, which is often mistakenly used synonymously with ‘people smuggling’, have resulted in no fewer than 22 definitions in academia (Salt & Hogarth, 2000). ̽��ֱ��EU, for example, earmarked 18 October as its ‘Anti-Trafficking Day’ while the UK calls the same date ‘Anti-Slavery Day’. While academics and policy-makers debate about the semantics, people continue to be bought, sold, and exploited like chattels.

Efforts to curtail this vile underground trade have been notably ineffective. Owing mainly to a lack of partnerships and knowledge-sharing between governments, NGOs, and supranational organisations, the number of people helped, according to the US Department of State, is small (around 48,000 or approximately 0.12% of the total) and the number of criminals convicted lamentable (around 4,000 or roughly 0.8% of the total).

If we are to gain an understanding of THB, convict more traffickers, and protect more victims and potential victims (following the current best practice from the USA of 4Ps – prevention, protection, prosecution and partnerships), we need to pinpoint and share the key data associated with it – and fathom the complex mechanisms used to enable and facilitate it. Research by Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, for example, has shown that many victims are re-victimised within criminal justice systems which, failing to recognise their true predicament, prosecutes them as complicit criminals and/or illegal immigrants.

My research suggests that traffickers should not to be seen and explained through a moralistic lens as simply depraved persons. These are cynical business men and women who, spotting a gap in the market and by satisfying denied demand, seek to maximise profits and minimise risk, while considering the human beings they buy and sell as commodities.

Risk is minimised by THB being a ‘silent’ crime. Cases are extremely hard to prosecute and high conviction clearance rates difficult to achieve, for many reasons. Profits are maximised because people can be sold and re-sold, while being ruthlessly exploited (my research has found cases where the victim was ‘visited’ by up to 100 ‘clients’ each day). My research in Greece has corroborated findings in other countries that people can change hands up to 15 times, unlike drugs which can be sold only once and weapons two or three times – human beings are markedly more lucrative to criminals.

THB and slavery is thought to generate profits of approximately $31.6 - $150 billion per annum, making the trafficking of human beings the third most profitable transnational organised crime (although and unlike smuggling of persons, THB is not always transnational – internal trafficking takes place within a country’s borders), after drugs and counterfeit goods. ̽��ֱ��human costs of this most inhumane of crimes, which strips people of their basic human rights, are incalculable and damaging to all communities involved.

Lack of consensus about what constitutes trafficking in human beings led the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (which was supplemented by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children) to devise an all-encompassing and lengthy, legal definition for ‘trafficking in persons’.

̽��ֱ��UN definition came into effect on 25 December 2003 (and still has not been ratified by many countries as of today). It frames the crime (Act + Means + Purpose = THB), clearly within terms of coercion, threat of force, and abuse or exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful. This description broadly matches public perceptions of THB.

Nonetheless, there is an even more insidious type of THB. It exists on the blurred boundaries of what is illegal or illicit and what is not – and it’s called ‘happy trafficking’. This concept, shocking in its seeming contradictory nature, was first used some eight years ago to describe a novel THB typology – one in which female victims are sold a ‘happy’ story of a worthwhile employment opportunity in another country.

This positive even joyful narrative is, ironically and tragically, peddled by women who have usually been THB victims themselves. ̽��ֱ��psychological incentives behind the entrapment of these women are many and diverse, and my research has found that most frequently it is due to: severe despondence, confusion, spite, profiteering/not knowing other form of employment, Stockholm syndrome, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Typically, these female victims, much like their ‘happy’ female recruiters, are poor, illiterate, powerless and, therefore, desperate.

‘Happy trafficking’ is not just a global reality but also a growing reality. Its increase presents a huge challenge at a time when society is both increasingly globalised and increasingly unequal. So, what is happy trafficking and who are the people involved in it?

My initial research focuses on sex-THB (or trafficking of human beings for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation) in and via Greece, and suggests that ‘happy trafficking’ can be divided into two distinct categories: trafficking of victims recruited mainly by women; and trafficking of victims recruited mainly by men.

In the first category, the female trafficker is frequently an acquaintance of the victim, or comes from the same region, and has usually been trafficked herself. Thus, she is able to feign a sense of happiness which reinforces her narrative and recruitment efforts. In the second category, the male trafficker, known in THB slang as ‘lover-boy’, deploys charm and seduction, frequently via the internet, and dupes girls (usually) into various forms of exploitation (eg marriages of convenience, benefits fraud, etc).

Let’s look first at trafficking of women recruited by women via ‘happy trafficking’. Participants of THB engage in a criminal trade that involves multiple layers, networks and areas of expertise. Examples include recruiters, debt-collectors, enforcers, transporters, and accountants/money launderers. Division of labour (whether within a criminal group or via outsourcing to external specialists) is a strategy that helps to spread risk and avoid detection.

Physical and psychological abuse is combined with financial incentives to turn victims into recruiters. Traffickers grant some victims who (due to sexually-transmitted infections and/or age) are no longer profitable, a degree of freedom. They are rewarded with token amounts of cash and gifts, while being coerced through other means to return to their home countries in order to recruit women. These are the women who, frequently, employ the technique of ‘happy trafficking’ in their recruitment efforts.

̽��ֱ��adjective ‘happy’, in this case, refers to the victims-turned-traffickers’ practice of claiming to have had a positive experience in legitimate jobs in the West or elsewhere, hiding the fact that they have, for example, been forced into prostitution and therefore, been sexually, physically and psychologically abused for years on end.

Anti-trafficking researchers and experts maintain that these victims of ‘happy trafficking’ are subjected to a subtle form of psychological coercion with the result that they believe they will be rewarded if they comply and be punished if they do not. Finding themselves trapped, they become ‘happily’ complicit.

Some women who have been trafficked instead of recruiters, become pimps, brokering illegal or illicit commercial sexual transactions. Organised criminal groups (OCGs) employ women to run brothels, partly because criminal justice systems (CJSs) tend to be more lenient to female criminals than to male. In many parts of Eurasia, for instance, researchers have found that female prisoners are released when pregnant or mothers of children, and receive, due to bias, lighter sentences than men, often because they are found guilty only of low-level offences.

̽��ֱ��second ‘lover-boy’ type of ‘happy trafficking’ is devious in different ways, but again focuses on recruiters working for OCGs. When men pose as ‘boyfriends’ and groom women to trust them and willingly travel with them, it is extremely difficult for law enforcement and border patrol agencies to identify the duplicitous and nuanced nature of what is going on – and even to prove that a criminal activity is taking place.

My research has shown that, frequently, the trafficker ‘marries’ his victim in order to obtain visas for EU countries or, in other cases, sends her alone overseas, claiming a delay in his departure and instructing her to meet a ‘friend’ on arrival. That ‘friend’ is usually part of the same OCG and almost always, a slave-trader and/or a brothel owner.

These sham marriages, or as EUROPOL calls them ‘marriages of convenience’, as a product of ‘happy trafficking’ and as cover, neatly eliminate the need for enlisting (and paying) a corrupt border official – for corruption is a historic, vital enabler of THB. Furthermore, when a recruiter presents himself as a genuine spouse, the waters are conveniently muddied. How can a victim be aware of her predicament when she is travelling happily alongside the person she perceives to be her husband (or fiancé) on a plane or train, bound for a rich country where opportunities and jobs abound?

Once these women (and victims of ‘lover-boy’ trafficking are overwhelmingly female) have arrived at their destination, their ‘husbands’ or their ‘friends’, take away their travel documents and identity cards, holding them captive and exploiting them in many ways, in a country where they probably do not speak the local language and may well be perceived as illegal immigrants.

̽��ֱ��total budget of combined global efforts to combat THB is around $350 million per annum, or just 0.23% of THB’s annual profit. In matters of THB, as in other crimes, law enforcement bodies and CJSs struggle to keep pace with the ingenuity of OCGs which increasingly make use of the internet as a facilitator and exploit established legal business structures – such as travel and au pair agencies – as cover and/or as enticing parts of the contrived, ‘happy’ recruitment story. That is where scholars and researchers must step in to foster partnerships and exchange evidenced-based findings.

With a view to contributing to such partnerships, I recently visited EUROPOL at ̽��ֱ��Hague at the invitation of its director, Rob Wainwright, who believes in the importance of partnerships with academia. I was appointed a member of EUROPOL’s Platform for Experts, EPE – an invitation-only, secure collaboration web platform for experts in a variety of law enforcement areas. EUROPOL has discovered that OCGs do indeed recruit using both types of ‘happy trafficking’, alongside the use of the internet. An emerging trend is for victims to come from the European middle classes, perhaps due to the ongoing socioeconomic crises in source countries.

Moreover, EUROPOL’s experts shared new trends related to transnational organised crime. OCGs self-launder their proceeds, exploit family and/or ethnic networks to run their operations, depend chiefly on cash transactions, and sometimes exploit their victims as cash couriers as well. Additionally, they have found that in order to launder their proceeds, OCGs invest in cash-intensive businesses, such as petrol stations or strip-clubs, which provide a veneer of legality.

‘Happy trafficking’ is just one of many recruitment techniques, employed by the perpetrators of the pernicious and illegal trade in human beings. Strong partnerships between law enforcement agencies and academia will contribute to reciprocal knowledge-sharing, as well as to more effective methods of confronting and curtailing such phenomena. I hope that my own research will contribute, in part, to the reduction of the crime-related suffering of others.

George Papadimitrakopoulos is a postgraduate researcher and Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholar at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��term ‘happy trafficking’ appears deeply contradictory, but new research reveals a shocking dimension of an escalating trade. George Papadimitrakopoulos, Institute of Criminology, offers insights and describes how victims are deceived, manipulated and exploited.

‘Happy trafficking’ is not just a global reality but also a growing reality – its increase presents a huge challenge at a time when society is both increasingly globalised and increasingly unequal

George Papadimitrakopoulos

Hernán Piñera

Airport

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Soul seller: the man who moved people

lw355 — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 09:00:14 +0000

Johannes Tschudi was 23 years old when he and his wife Anna left Germany in 1749 aboard the Crown in search of work and a new life on American soil. He was to take the perilous voyage across the Atlantic a further four times – a remarkable number considering how many migrants, including his wife Anna, died on these trips. But perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that between his first and last voyage, Johannes Tschudi transformed from a trafficked migrant to enter the business of selling souls – he became a human trafficker.

̽��ֱ��notion of human trafficking is a familiar one today: individuals, either lured by the prospect of a better life or coerced, are recruited, transported, harboured and ultimately exploited by the trafficker. ̽��ֱ��United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that at any one time this billion-dollar business is responsible for 2.5 million victims, many of whom will end up in forced labour, slavery, prostitution or begging.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, trafficking was connected with a rather different purpose, as Cambridge historian, and Fellow of Trinity Hall, Dr William O’Reilly explained: “Trafficking speeded up the establishment of new settlements in America and eastern Europe, where a labour force was needed. This was a time when people were resigned to the inevitability of emigration. Borders were relatively close and various wars had left individuals questioning their long-term safety. In the 18th century alone, as many as one million emigrated from their homelands in western and central Europe to start new lives, mostly in North America and Hungary.”

In fact, the German people, O’Reilly finds, were one of the most migratory of all national groups at this time. Yet the role of the traffickers to populate these new societies has been largely overlooked.

His research, to be published as a book in 2014, provides fresh insight into the activities of these people movers, arguing that their actions kick-started the first systemisation of migration: “Until the process of moving people became a profitable business enterprise, and connections were made between the supply and demand for human cargo, large-scale migration could not occur.”

On Tschudi’s first journey in 1749, he was one of 476 migrants all connected to him by blood or village; they had been recruited by Johannes Marti. On his final journey in 1767, Tschudi had recruited all 62 passengers on board the Sally bound for Philadelphia. “It seems likely that Marti was, at least in part, responsible for the recruitment of Tschudi as a migrant to the Americas and may have facilitated his re-invention as a recruiting agent himself,” said O’Reilly. “This was a chain migration, but it was also a chain recruitment, where the apprentice learnt from the master agent.”

In studies of migration, movement of people is often considered in terms of ‘push and pull’, in which labour shortages in one area might pull migrants, and poor conditions at home might push them. “But this model does not adequately explain European migration before the 19th century; it would suggest that all migrants acted freely and independently,” said O’Reilly.

“This was not the case here. It was more often directed by traffickers towards a specific territory because of the financial reward they would accrue and it was done so through their command of a niche market in information. By selling labour bonds – a ceel in Dutch – these traffickers sold on more than a person’s labour; they sold their soul, or ziel. Contemporaries considered that these labour-bond sellers became 18th-century soul sellers, the beginning of the modern trafficker.”

O’Reilly’s painstaking study of ships’ logs, maps, newspapers, arrest warrants, customs documents, river networks and letters, across seven countries, has enabled him to paint a remarkable picture of the complex processes that were at work. “Traffickers provided a bridge to a new life in a new land for those wishing to cross. It was a market where labour was retailed most successfully if people like Tschudi acted as brokers, filling ships with ‘human freight’ for the transatlantic crossing.”

In effect, the traffickers were walking propaganda machines. “They had to convince would-be migrants of the benefits of migration, to the point of underhand deception. As one example, some were told ‘roasted pigeons would fly into their mouths without having to work for them’.”

̽��ֱ��traffickers also had to thwart negative stories about the harrowing journey fed back by previous migrants. One traveller wrote: “hunger, thirst, and scarcity of all help had cost the lives of the majority on the ship.” Another that many “came close to murdering one another” in the cramped conditions. There were even tales of having to cook and eat dead fellow passengers. O’Reilly estimates mortality at around 15% or even higher as shipping firms in Holland, England and America, seeking to maximise profits, continued to raise the average number of emigrants per vessel.

“Tschudi, and others like him, learned quickly that by counteracting these negative descriptions of the journey with stories of limitless land and bread, of freedom and prosperity, he could turn a handsome profit,” said O’Reilly.

Traffickers could access information about opportunities abroad that was not generally known to potential emigrants. “For me, one definition of trafficking is the sourcing and supply of information leading to migration. In this regard, this is a story across time. From what I’ve found looking at contemporary situations – human trafficking from Moldova, for example – nothing has changed terribly much. ̽��ֱ��information comes from migrants who return home typically in the employ of other agents, and who then gain money for every migrant they recruit in turn.”

“It opened up information channels for those who, through illiteracy or geographic isolation, would have remained ignorant of the possibilities open to them,” he explained. “But the information was endowed with inflated images and delivered by those adept at marketing it for their audience.”

Tschudi’s dishonesty was publicly revealed. Shortly after the Sally docked in Philadelphia, a letter appeared in the local newspaper on behalf of all the migrants who had taken the journey, denouncing him as a “paragon of wickedness, an arrant liar and an out-an-out deceiver” who had “enticed and seduced nearly fifty people” to travel to America, in part through blackmail, in part through the threat of physical violence. “Their resentment was focused on the arduous journey,” said O’Reilly, “but no doubt by this stage the migrants would also have encountered the realities of settling in a new country and finding suitable employment, and have come to realise that not all was paved with riches as he had described.”

“Tschudi refused to accept the accusations levelled against him but his accusers would not go away,” added O’Reilly, who estimates that migrants would have paid £5–10 for the privilege of emigrating. “Denouncing him, they said that he had tricked them with his tales of encouragement, while all the while ‘he took a sum of money from a merchant… with the promise of delivering to him a number of people’.” Men, and women traffickers too, grew rich on the profit of human trafficking.

O’Reilly’s research highlights the role of traffickers like Tschudi as key to the process of migration. “Facilitator, escort, at times swindler and cheat, the human trafficker bound an ever-shrinking world together with ties of information and opportunity, and in effect aided the development of global labour markets for Europeans.”

For further information about this story, please contact Louise Walsh at louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk

People trafficking is a billion-dollar business with a history that spans centuries. A new study identifies the beginnings of the modern trafficker – the men and women who “sold souls” in 17th- and 18th-century Germany.

This was a chain migration, but it was also a chain recruitment, where the apprentice learnt from the master agent

William O'Reilly

Harper's Weekly (New York), November 7, 1874 (Library of Congress)

German migrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg, Germany, to travel to America

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Transporter 5: solving an ancient mystery of the cell

amb206 — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:28:47 +0000

̽��ֱ��people who work there call it the Titanic. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, a shiny building with funnel-like air vents on the Addenbrooke’s complex, is the workplace of around 250 scientists, many of them internationally acclaimed in their fields. Its 40 research groups are dedicated to advancing the basic and clinical science that is needed to understand the molecular mechanisms of disease. It is in these laboratories that some of the foundational research takes place that will pave the way for the development of drugs and therapies that will save lives in the future.

Earlier this year one of these groups – a team of seven scientists led by eminent cell biologist Professor Margaret Robinson – made a discovery that will lead to some of the key information contained in cell biology textbooks being revised. Working with colleagues at the ̽��ֱ�� of Alberta in Canada, the team showed that the cells of all eukaryotes (a term used to describe the cell structure of animals, plants and fungi) contain five adaptor protein complexes (APs). This finding confounds existing assumptions that only four APs are present in cells – and will help scientists learn more about, and ultimately treat, certain genetic disorders.

Scientists have known about the existence of APs – which are vital to the functions of cells – ever since the late 1970s. Four APs were identified by researchers in the space of some 20 years. “As recently as 2004 I was quoted in the scientific literature stating categorically that there were no more than four APs,” says Professor Robinson. “It just goes to show that you can’t be too certain that you’ve found everything there is to find. And even more importantly it illustrates just how vital it is to carry out fundamental research, to provide the knowledge needed to feed into the translational research that could ultimately lead to cures for diseases.”

Cells are often described as the building blocks of life. As every school child is taught, cells have a nucleus, a surrounding membrane and cytoplasm. ̽��ֱ��intricate workings of the cell, however, are much more complex and represent a fascinating puzzle for biologists. Cells are full of compartments, visible only through the most powerful microscopes. These compartments do not exist in isolation but communicate with each other – for example, to send newly-made molecules from the place where they are manufactured to the place where they need to be in order to function.

Tiny spherical vesicles transport proteins and other molecules around the cell in a process that scientists call trafficking. But in order for the different compartments not to get mixed up, the cell needs to put some molecules into vesicles as cargo to be delivered to a new compartment, while leaving others behind. ̽��ֱ��machinery that selects which molecules will go into the vesicles includes the adaptor proteins. ̽��ֱ��word adaptor is used to describe their ability to connect two different types of molecules together: the cargo and the structural proteins that physically form the vesicle.

̽��ֱ��way in which adaptor proteins pick up molecules from compartments can be likened to diners in a sushi bar, picking up dishes of food from a passing conveyor belt avoiding items they dislike and opting for those they desire. “APs have different ways of recognising molecules. It’s a process that we are only just beginning to understand, but this fundamental research could impact on the study of diseases where certain molecules fail to get trafficked correctly,” says Dr Jennifer Hirst, who is a senior researcher in the Robinson lab and has discovered and characterised a number of new adaptors.

̽��ֱ��best characterised adaptors exist as complexes of four different proteins: two large, one medium, and one small. Two of these adaptor protein complexes – known as AP-1 and AP-2 – were the first ones to be identified, and they are essential to life. AP-3 was found in the mid-1990s and AP-4 in 1999. All four of these APs are found in most organisms – though it has been shown that some organisms naturally lack one of them, because they do not need it and so have lost it during evolution. People who lack AP-3 and AP-4 suffer from different conditions such as lack of skin pigmentation in the case of AP-3 and learning difficulties in the case of AP-4.

̽��ֱ��discovery of a fifth AP came about when micro-biologists found a so-called ‘orphan’ protein in a soil amoeba, which bore a weak family resemblance to the medium-sized subunits of AP complexes, but did not seem to fit the profile of the other family members. What was the role of this orphan, which was found in humans and other vertebrates, but not in flies, worms and yeast?

In carrying out their research the Cambridge scientists developed a partnership with peers at the Department of Cell Biology at ̽��ֱ�� of Alberta where Assistant Professor Dr Joel Dacks is an evolutionary cell biologist. His special interest is in the evolution and diversity of the eukaryotic membrane-trafficking system. “It was Joel who first alerted us to this orphan protein,” said Dr Robinson. “He sent us an email asking if we wanted to collaborate with him to investigate its function. He said: ‘Whatever it is doing, it has been doing it for a long time.’ This is because the strands of life that gave rise to humans on the one hand, and the soil amoebae on the other hand, separated from each other over a billion years ago. ̽��ֱ��fact that we both have this orphan protein means that it must have already existed in our common ancestor.”

In their search for an answer, Dr Hirst and colleagues carried out four years of meticulous research, much of it involving frustrating bench work in their lab on the fifth floor at CIMR looking for other proteins that might bind to the orphan. In spite of differences between the orphan and the medium-sized subunits of the four AP complexes, they eventually found that the orphan protein has a family after all. It gets together with two large proteins and a small protein to make a fifth AP complex. One of the large proteins had already been implicated in a genetic disorder, hereditary spastic paraplegia.

̽��ֱ��identification of AP-5 may prove helpful in the understanding of conditions such as hereditary spastic paraplegia – though the scientists involved in its discovery stress that their research is at an early stage. “We are really excited to have found that there is a medical connection, but much further research will be needed to how loss of AP-5 leads to this particular disorder.”

̽��ֱ��discovery by scientists in Cambridge and Alberta of a fifth adaptor protein – a tiny and vital component of many cells –will lay the foundations for a greater understanding of genetic disorders.

This fundamental research could impact on the study of diseases where certain molecules fail to get trafficked correctly.

Dr Jennifer Hirst

Professor Margaret Robinson

Image of a cell with AP-5 showing in green, AP-1 and AP-2 in red.

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