Emile Durkheim Human Trafficking Summary

Durkheim would say, if you look at the offender and their social world, they might have had done this to achieve an obligation of a social role such as, construction manager. So, in that managers social world they have certain obligations placed on them to fulfill, and that may seem immoral to someone not in that collective consciousness. Durkheim would say we are not innately moral in anyway, but only act morally because of social obligations placed on us. Another reason why a construction manager may be involved in slave labor could be explained by Durkheim’s explanation of human nature. Durkheim believed that not far beneath the surface of the above mentioned social moral self is an innate desire to destroy a functioning social order in

Offenders are split up into varying jobs from recruiters in the country of origin, to transporters, and can even be the receivers of trafficked humans in the destination country (Bruckert 2002). There is not one individual responsible for this crime and therefore it makes sense for this to be a learned behavior. When looking at the literature it is clear that these varying offenders typically have four different stages in committing these acts of human trafficking. In the first stage they typically try and recruit their victims by luring them by using some sort of deception or fraud. A lot of these offenders do not necessarily use violence in order to attain their victims, but rather their victims fall prey to the promise of a better life or enhanced economic opportunities (Shelley 2010). For example, they tell their victims that they can live a better life in a different country and get better work or better resources etc. A story from a victim of labor trafficking told in an article from Bowe in 2003, states that this victim was promised great and fair pay in South Florida. So the

However, in Sutherland’s differential association theory he states that criminal behavior is learned from your intimate groups and the definitions of committing crime outweigh the unfavorable definitions (Scarpitti 2009). Since these offenders vary from investors to corrupt public officials they must have learned this behavior from someone they trusted and respected. Someone eventually told them it was “ok” to act this way and once they got enough of these definitions favorable to this crime they started committing it themselves. For example, a new police officer joins the force and the officer training him is doing some “under the table” dealings while out I the field. The new police officer talks to other members in the department and they reinforce these definitions favorable to this criminal behavior. I believe eventually that officer will act on this criminality since his definitions favorable to this criminal behavior is being outweighed by all the other corrupt officers around him. By looking at the literature Sutherland’s theory is reinforced by looking at a statistical analysis in Shelley’s (2010) book that shows that many of the offenders caught are either friends/family or business partners of some kind. In other words the people caught up in this criminal enterprise probably “learned” this behavior from people in their intimate