The Complex Relationship between Police Corruption and Sex Trafficking in Origin Countries

ABSTRACT

Human trafficking is a very lucrative illegal business. As such, investigating this criminal activity in source countries requires a deeper understanding of what constitute costs and benefits, and consequently traffickers’ incentives to traffic. The argument of this paper is that police corruption lowers the costs for traffickers in origin countries by facilitating the recruitment of victims, and protecting traffickers from detection and prosecution. Using two novel proxies for police corruption––reliability of the police and bribe seeking among police officials––the paper tests the relationship between police corruption and trafficking activity on a cross-section sample of up to 109 countries. The results suggest that countries that experience more corruption within their police forces are more affected by trafficking outflow also, when controlling for variables that have been stressed to constitute important push-factors such as income, female unemployment rates, and freedom of foreign movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Law enforcement
• migration
• organized crime
• police corruption
• transnational human trafficking for sexual exploitation

Notes

¹ About 70 percent of the movement takes place across countries, while 31 percent is domestic (UNODC 2012).

² The authors also find that this result is strongest when the flow primarily consists of sex trafficking.

³ This paper defines corruption as “the use of public office for private gains” (Bardhan, 1997).

⁴ The authors use the World Bank’s measurement of control of corruption.

⁵ The data set is constructed based on the US State Department’s Tier list from 2000 to 2010 and the 2006 and 2009 global reports from UNODC.

⁶ The paper focuses on the traffickers’, rather than the police’s benefit. However, it is clear from the qualitative sources that the police also gain from such relationship. As such, the paper does not discuss the police officers’ role more extensively.

⁷ One Chief of the Public Peace and Order Section of Police, whose section was “in charge of the suppression of prostitution” and “responsible for escort agencies” “received bribes in the form of money and valuable articles from the owners of agencies; in return, he did not carry out raids in these agencies” (UNODC, 2006).

⁸ Although the measurement incorporates all forms of human trafficking, this paper uses the data as a proxy of sex-trafficking outflow; since at the time these data were collected, UNODC estimated that most trafficking incidents concerned human trafficking for sexual exploitation.

⁹ In the analyses, rule of law from FreedomHouse (2016) and control of corruption from Kaufmann et al. (2010) are used.

¹⁰ The measurement from UNODC used for the dependent variable is based on reported cases of trafficking activity. Levels of corruption within a country might affect part of the reporting, but the potential bias is somewhat mitigated since UNODC has used different sources ranging from country government officials to the media and country independent NGOs. It is however plausible that countries with more corruption would be more reluctant to report trafficking activity, while less corrupt countries would report more trafficking activity. The negative direction of this bias might thus strengthen the results indicating that corruption is positively associated with trafficking.

¹¹ It is plausible that high presence of trafficking activity in turn gives rise to police corruption. Hence, due to endogeneity concerns inherent in the cross-section design of this paper I additionally run an instrumental-variables regression (2SLS), with rate of police personnel as an instrument. The relatively small p-value for the Wu–Hausman statistics indicates that the main explanatory variables, bribe seeking and reliability in the police, can be treated as exogenous. Additionally, a small partial R² and F-statistics indicate that the chosen instrument is too weak (see Table A3 in the Appendix E).