A Gendered Perspective on Human Trafficking Perpetrators: Evidence from Russia

ABSTRACT

The dominant depiction of human trafficking is that of a violent man trafficking an innocent, subordinate female victim for sexual exploitation. However, this does not represent the diversity of the experience of human trafficking. Increasingly, research has suggested that women are also perpetrators of human trafficking and that men and boys are frequently victims. Using a content analysis of Russian media articles on trafficking cases from 2003 to 2013, I examine women perpetrators of trafficking. I show that women have leveraged gender stereotypes and their positions in society to participate in trafficking in a variety of ways and that they are also enabled by particular structural characteristics of the trafficking business. I argue that a gendered perspective on perpetrators combined with deep empirical analysis can help us better understand what trafficking looks like in reality and how the experiences of women in trafficking are more complex than stereotypes would have us believe.

KEYWORDS:

• Human trafficking
• gender
• women
• Russia
• perpetrators

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Annie Hill for her thoughtful commentary on how to improve this article and to Dakota Irvin and Arkadiy Chapko for research assistance. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

The author has received no financial interest or benefit from this research.

Notes

¹ For example, from 2007 to 2010, 77% of traffickers convicted and 62% of those prosecuted in the region were women, compared to an overall world average of 32% prosecuted and 33% convicted (UNODC, 2012). By comparison, data from 34 European countries from 2008 to 2010 shows that only 25% of suspected, prosecuted and convicted traffickers were women (Eurostat, 2013). As with all quantitative data on human trafficking, these numbers must be contextualized. The data are provided by national governments, and not all governments in the region participate, or keep statistics that would allow them to provide data on perpetrators broken down by gender. Some years of the UNODC reports are more complete than others. In 2012, 11 Eastern European/Central Asian countries (unclear if Russia was included) provided data on the gender of perpetrators, whereas in 2016, only six countries did (not including Russia). The 2014 report did not specify which or how many countries their data was based on (UNODC, 2012, 2014, 2016).

² Kleemans et al. (2014) looks at women’s involvement in a broader set of organized crime cases in the Netherlands, including human trafficking, but does not separate out the ways that women are involved in trafficking cases.

³ Cases that remained open past December 2013 were also included, with a final update in October 2015. For a more detailed description of methodology and the larger project, see McCarthy 2015. Cases are referenced by their database identification number throughout this article. Basic information on all database cases is located on the author’s website: http://people.umass.edu/laurenmc/traffickingjustice.

⁴ The words were: “human trafficking” (torgovlia liud’mi) and “use of slave labor” (ispol’zovanie rabskogo truda), the official wording of the Criminal Code articles, along with other terms that connote human trafficking such as sexual slavery (seksual’noe rabstvo), sex slave (seks rabyn’), slave trade (rabotorgovlia), slaveholder (rabovladelets), and trafficking (traffiking, treffiking). Separate emails were delivered for each keyword.

⁵ These websites included: newsru.com, regions.ru, regnum.ru, Interfax, RIA Novsoti, Gzt.ru, Komsomol’skaia Pravda, Novyi region, and Nr2.ru. I also ran a search for the same terms in the Eastview database of Russian national and regional newspapers.

⁶ In the Russian system, indictment and sentencing documents outline in detail all the proof that exists for each separate charge for each person being charged, each piece of evidence collected and how it fits into the charge/sentence. These documents can run anywhere from ten to several hundred pages. They are often difficult to obtain and not readily available to researchers. I was able to locate 161 of them for the 279 cases charged as human trafficking, which were either on court websites or given to me by law enforcement personnel.

⁷ The broader dataset of 279 cases charged as trafficking in Russia show that 227 of them were domestic and 29 inter-regional (McCarthy, 2015). This mirrors data from the UNODC, which also looks at identified cases, where 99% of victims of trafficking in the Eastern Europe/Central Asia region have either been trafficked domestically or inter-regionally and 90% of convicted traffickers are citizens of the countries where they are prosecuted (UNODC, 2014, 2016).

⁸ The UN has labeled this recruitment strategy “happy trafficking” (Kienast et al., 2014).

⁹ This is in contrast to the traditional organized crime mafia model, where women generally only appeared as leaders in times of crisis, when their husbands or fathers were in prison, roles which they relinquished as soon as the male leader returned (Fiandaca, 2003). This also held true in Russian mafia activities where women’s roles were limited to mothers and wives/companions/lovers who served as helpers and confidants (Gilinsky 2003). Women occasionally played auxiliary roles or were employed in side industries controlled by the mafia, but rarely took on central roles (Pizzini-Gambetta, 2014).

¹⁰ The one major exception to this is in child trafficking cases where violence is rarely necessary (Shen, 2016).