“Who are the Victims, Who are the Traffickers?” University Students’ Portrayals on Human Trafficking

ABSTRACT

Although human trafficking is a widely studied phenomenon, there is a lack of perceptions toward its victims and offenders. The purpose of this study is to analyze Portuguese university students’ portrayals of victims and traffickers. This study included 199 participants that answered an internet survey The participants’ mean age was 23.23 (SD = 6.24) years, with most of the participants being women (65%). Thematic analysis was used to determine dominant themes and subthemes. The results revealed three main themes: Victim portrayal and victimization dynamics; Traffickers portrayals and criminal dynamics; Trafficking dynamics. The participants reported, commonly, the socioeconomic status of the victim as an important reason to be trafficked. In the student’s perception, this enables the traffickers to be aware of the victim’s life conditions and, therefore, they are lured with false promises of a better life. Despite that, 17% of the participants sustained an undifferentiated victim and trafficker portrayal and 6% of them revealed that they had no knowledge of human trafficking and underlying causes. The implication for future research, practice and public policy (preventive and informative campaigns, disclosure of human trafficking victimization situations) are addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Human trafficking
• perceptions
• University students
• victims
• traffickers
• portrayals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Directive 2011/36/EU from the European Parliament and of the Council, of 5 April, on preventing and combating human trafficking and protecting Victims, that replaces the Decision 2002/692/JAI from the Council.

2. The terms “human trafficking” and “migrant smuggling” are two distinct crimes that are often wrongly conflated or referred to interchangeably. Migrant smuggling concerns the facilitation of the illegal border crossing of a person into a state party of which that person is not a part of (not a national or resident) to obtain a financial or monetary benefit. Migrant smuggling is a different crime but sometimes can have connections with human trafficking. A key difference is that victims of human trafficking are considered victims of a crime under international law; instead smuggled migrants are not (they pay smugglers to facilitate their movement to another country). In human trafficking there is no need to involve a border crossing, however sometimes the victims are international migrants (Article 3, Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, 2000), accessible on: https://www.unodc.org/documents/middleeastandnorthafrica/smuggling-migrants/SoM_Protocol_English.pdf.

3. On the differentiated portrayals, the participant mentioned at least one characteristic of the victim or trafficker (e.g. it is a woman, young, it is a man, with money). In the undifferentiated portrayals the participants didn’t mention any characteristic of the victim or trafficker (e.g. it can be anyone).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (UID/PSI/01662/2019), through the national funds (PIDDAC).