Public Awareness of Human Trafficking in Europe: How Concerned Are European Citizens?

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between a European Union (EU) citizens’ degrees of concern toward human trafficking and demographic characteristics, attitudes toward immigrants, and proximity variables (such as geographic region, the number of immigrants, and the percentage of immigrants within their country) using the Eurobarometer 2003 (N = 15,650), which surveyed participants in 15 EU countries. A regression analysis found that older citizens, female citizens, citizens with strong attitudes toward immigrants, citizens who lived in countries that were main routes of illegal immigration, and citizens who lived in regions with more immigrants show more concern about trafficking.

KEYWORDS:

• Human trafficking
• awareness
• European Union
• immigration
• gender

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Jini Roby, Stephanie Matsumura, and Gordon Limb for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. We realize that “awareness” and “concern” have different meanings. Given that the dataset does not conceptualize concern and most of the literature talks about awareness, we decided to use concern as a proxy for awareness.

2. Norway did not participate in this wave of the Eurobarometer.

3. The second question was: “For the issue we have just mentioned (trafficking in human beings), could you tell me whether coordinated action at the EU level is very desirable, fairly desirable, not very desirable, or not at all desirable?”

4. A more detailed analysis of the five original categories did not show marked differences in the results.