Journal of Human Trafficking
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/uhmt20/current
Introduction to the Special Issue
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Human Rights Violators in Comparative Perspective
DOI:10.1080/23322705.2016.1136166
Austin Choi-Fitzpatricka*
pages 1-14
Published online: 03 Mar 2016
ABSTRACT
A large and growing wave of scholarship has focused attention on a variety of contemporary forms of slavery. Early attention went to victims of sexual exploitation, though this is starting to slowly change with a growing body of work on labor exploitation. Previous studies focused exclusively on international trafficking and on the Global South whereas newer studies emphasize domestic trafficking and exploitation in the Global North. This article, and the special issue it introduces, suggests that it is high time scholars and advocates broaden their scope to more clearly focus on perpetrators and on the emancipation process. Perpetrators are too often thought of as “criminals of the worst sort,” a cultural shorthand that reduces understanding and thereby hampers both theory and practice of emancipation. For its part, emancipation is too often thought of as either “freedom” or the binary opposite of slavery. Here too, reality is more complex and fraught. In this article, I argue that a human rights approach to slaveholders and emancipation would improve greatly on the status quo.

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Articles
Eliminating Corporate Exploitation: Examining Accountability Regimes as Means to Eradicate Forced Labor from Supply Chains
Ashley Feasley
Columbus School of Law, Catholic University, Washington, DC, USA and Director of Advocacy, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., Silver Spring, Maryland, USApages 15-31
DOI:10.1080/23322705.2016.1137194
ABSTRACT
The existence of forced labor in a company’s supply chain represents the newest frontier of the global effort to eliminate forced labor. Corporations, beneficiaries of profits from products made with forced labor, represent the most nimble and most modern perpetrators of trafficking and exploitation. The negative publicity and consumer backlash that companies are facing for having forced labor in their supply chains reflects the new paradigm confronting corporate perpetrators with respect to international human rights. This article discusses four established regimes of accountability and reviews each regime’s efficacy in ensuring that corporations operate transparent, forced labor-free supply chains. The respective regimes: international regulation, market-based, civil liability, and domestic regulation, have achieved varying levels of success in recent years in an effort to make businesses accountable for ensuring forced labor-free supply chains. Analysis of accountability regimes and the successes and obstacles each regime has encountered in eliminating forced labor from corporate supply chains forcing companies to address forced labor maps progress that has occurred and also provides evaluation of what each accountability regime can provide to ensure businesses eliminate forced labor from their supply chains.

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Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China: An Empirical Study
Anqi Shen
School of Social Sciences, Business and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom
pages 63-77
DOI:10.1080/23322705.2016.1136537
ABSTRACT
Through an empirical study, this article explores the overall profile of female traffickers of children in China and their role and performance in the trafficking processes. Its contribution to the human-trafficking literature lies in its focus on female perpetrators in particular. The article provides an overview of the international literature on female traffickers as well as contemporary knowledge about internal child trafficking in China. Empirical data from incarcerated traffickers suggest that portraying female traffickers as active players of criminal networks obscures the structural problems affecting female child traffickers. The short-term result is that the problems of female offenders are ignored, and the long-term impact is policy making that is disconnected from the lived experiences of an important population. From a gender perspective, this study suggests that female child traffickers are offenders as well as victims of social and gender inequalities in China’s reform era. This study also proposes that internal child trafficking in China should be brought in the international and Anglo-American debates surrounding human trafficking.

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Preliminary Data on a Sample of Perpetrators of Domestic Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation: Suggestions for Research and Practice
Katherine Gotch
Integrated Clinical & Correctional Services, Portland, Oregon, USA
pages 99-109
DOI:10.1080/23322705.2016.1136539
ABSTRACT
Trafficking for sexual exploitation is one aspect of human trafficking and, in recent years, there has been an increased awareness of and focus on domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation within the United States; however, very little is known about the psychological characteristics or criminogenic (i.e., causing or likely to cause criminal behavior) risk/need factors of the perpetrators who profit from domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation. In an attempt to expand the scope of known data on perpetrators of domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation, descriptive statistical analyses looking at factors hypothesized to be related to the psychological characteristics, criminogenic risk/need factors, and potential treatment interventions were conducted on a sample of 28 adult male offenders with an arrest, charge, and/or conviction of street-level domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation behavior in their history. The results provide preliminary data regarding the developmental/environmental factors, psychological characteristics, and criminogenic risk/need factors of this offender population, as well as support the hypothesis that perpetrators of domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation behavior appear to be a unique offender population requiring specialized management and therapeutic interventions. Suggestions and implications for practice and research are also provided.