Trafficking in Women: Local Perspectives with Global Implications (SpringerBriefs in Criminology)

In this book, the author examines human trafficking for sexual exploitation from a combined global and local perspective.  The author explores global patterns of trafficking, and then compares them with detailed field work on the local level in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The author draws comparisons between Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States, and Turkey, as destination countries for trafficking. This innovative work not only synthesises literature on trafficking, but also provides novel approach to theorising and studying trafficking, which will be of interest to scholars and officials working in the areas of crime and justice, migration, gender studies, as well as social policy and economics.
 

The work begins with a theoretical overview of human trafficking, including migration theory and migrant psychology, mechanisms of debt bondage, prostitution demand and nature of sex markets, and involvement of the organised crime. In this way a variety of different theories about trafficking in humans for sexual exploitation are synthesised into a coherent picture of how and why trafficking happens. In the second part of the book, the author moves on to explore whether theoretical explanations behind the phenomenon of human trafficking hold when tested on a global level. Results of this macro study are then tested again with a contrasting methodology, with case studies on a local level. In this way author attempts to combine micro and macro approaches to trafficking.


Over the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in the topic of human trafficking. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature, which is sometimes presented in a sensationalist way, with a lack of theory and data. With new data and a new methodological approach, this book aims to highlight the best explanations for human trafficking on a global level and advance the level of research on this important topic.