Human Trafficking: Contexts and Connections to Conventional Crime

Human trafficking involves the violation of societal norms and often activates criminal justice responses including police, courts, juvenile justice, and child protective services. Due to the complex nature of human trafficking, some behaviours that facilitate human trafficking cannot be easily identified and assigned to conventional crime categories. As a result of this complexity, criminologists have yet to fully explore the problem of human trafficking. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest among criminologists in human trafficking and its intersections with the criminal justice system and overlap with conventional types of crime. This edited collection of research aims to underscore these intersections in order to further improve the description, explanation, and prevention of human trafficking. Research contained in this book provides a step forward by describing police perceptions and responses to human trafficking while also providing insight into victims with reports on victim perceptions of their treatment by the police. Most notably, this volume has moved research on human trafficking beyond descriptive frequencies to sophisticated multivariate analyses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice.