You have full access to this open access article. Combatting trafficking in human beings is a well-established social policy and crime prevention priority for the twenty-first Century. Human trafficking, as defined in international law, can occur for diverse exploitative purposes. Yet, different forms of trafficking are routinely conflated in research, policy and interventions. Most of the attention to date has been on sex trafficking of women and girls, leaving male victims and other trafficking types comparatively overlooked.
For a sample of confirmed victims, we compare those trafficked for sex, domestic servitude and other labour across variables relating to victim demographics, the trafficking process and official responses. Having established significant and substantial differences at bivariate level, we use multinomial logistic regression to identify predictors of trafficking type.
Overall, our results underline the complexity and diversity of human trafficking and warn against conflating different types. Within a holistic counter-trafficking framework, a more disaggregated and nuanced approach to analysis and intervention is vital in ensuring more finely-targeted responses. This original study has clear lessons for research, policy and practice. Human trafficking can take many forms: diverse people may be moved within or between countries by various means for different purposes, including sexual exploitation, organ harvesting, domestic servitude work in private households and exploitation in numerous other licit and illicit labour markets.
Despite this inherent diversity, the focus of the trafficking field has long been skewed towards sexual exploitation — and specifically that of women and girls. In the years following Palermo, the international community continued to focus primarily on sex trafficking [ 35 ].
In the United States US e. As concerns escalated internationally over the first part of the twentieth Century, various international conventions were adopted that focused on protecting women and children more accurately, girls from prostitution Footnote 3 [ 35 ]. Similar tensions have been evident in the UK recently, with some politicians framing prostitution as de facto commercial sexual exploitation and overstating the evidence on its overlap with trafficking [ 3 , 38 ], seemingly to galvanise support for controversial legislative reforms around the advertising and sale of sex see, e.
