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Trafficking

Transporting Women Sex Workers From Nigeria to Europe

by Hasan Buker

Sex workers offer the simulation of sexual and romantic love, or at least transient sexual companionship. It is the wealthy part of the world running short on precious emotional and sexual resources and have had to turn to poorer regions for fresh supplies (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003: 5).

Globalization, a phenomenon we have heard much about in recent decades, enables us to share and experience many positive and negative exchanges with other nations. Recent improvements towards democracy in several countries are positive outcomes of that globalization process. Negative exchanges, however, such as crime across borders, are also a reality of that globalization process. Transporting human beings across borders, illegally and with illicit aims, is one of the activities threatening the peaceful future of many societies. This paper seeks to examine the dimensions of the human smuggling/trafficking problem from Nigeria to Europe.

The Upperworld Side of Illicit Trafficking

by Petrus C. van Duyne

Illicit Market Features

If we approach the organisation of crime of prohibited substances from the perspective of a criminal market phenomenon, we soon cross the beaten path of demand and supply of illicit commodities. Because the attention is directed at the ‘bad guys’ supplying the ‘forbidden fruits’, there is a bias to think also in terms of a supply side (criminal) economy. This is not a neo-conservative bias stemming from Reagan economic policy. Long before Reagan, illegal commodity trafficking used to be approached as a criminal supply phenomenon. From a narrow law enforcement perspective this is understandable: suppliers break the law and these should be apprehended. But does that do justice to a criminal commodity market? Let us look at the distinctive commercial and entrepreneurial features of such a market.

The Authorities as Market Determiners

In the first place we meet the most predominant market actor: the state. It is a platitude to say that it takes a ruling authority, be it a democratic or a dictatorial one, to declare certain customers’ conduct undesirable and prohibit the relevant commodities. This results in a shift from a legal to ‘forbidden fruits’ market, as is the case with the drugs market, the gambling or the sex market, just to name a few. The reasons for this penal law intervention may be ethical, religious, related to public health or a mixture.

Trends and Policies on Women Trafficking in the Netherlands

by Damián Zaitch and Richard Staring

Most women working in the Netherlands as prostitutes, particularly in the middle and cheaper market sections, are foreigners. While many can be considered free sex workers or entrepreneurs, others are, according to the Dutch legislation and UN definition, victims of ‘trafficking in human beings’ (THB) since they experience some form of coercion with the aim of exploitation. Since 2000, several developments have taken place in the Netherlands in order to tackle the problem of women trafficking, both at national and local level.

This article will first sketch the nature and extent of prostitution and women trafficking in the Netherlands, to then present and critically analyze the existing legislation, policies and concrete interventions concerning forced prostitution and women trafficking.¹

Cigarette Trafficking and Traffickers in the Netherlands(1)

by Maarten van Dijck

Excise laws are known since the Middle Ages. In those times, cities constituted what we nowadays call emerging markets. Already in 1274 Dutch cities acknowledged the benefits of levying taxes on certain luxury goods, such as salt and sugar (van der Poel 1928). Ever since the existence of duties black and grey economies have emerged; not paying taxes means a further reduction of costs, which gives the duty-evading smuggler² a competitive edge over his law-abiding and tax-paying counterpart. In addition, the contemporary ongoing increase in tobacco excise, used by the European governments to curb the unhealthy addiction of smoking, has a criminogenic side effect: to maintain their bad smoking habit, an increasing number of people, instead of quitting smoking, resort to the cheaper duty non-paid cigarettes, some of them starting bootlegging cigarettes themselves.

This paper sets out to describe some of the findings of a cigarette case study, which was conducted as part of the research project Assessing Organised Crime in 2005 and 2006. It focuses on subjects involved in cigarette smuggling in the Netherlands. The 43 cases studied for this purpose may not provide a picture that is fully representative of the overall population of cigarette smugglers in the Netherlands. After all, studying customs files inherently implies a number of biases. Nevertheless, the findings presented in this paper provide a description of how cigarette trafficking is organised in various ways and by whom.

Consequences of the War on Drugs for Transit Countries: The Jamaican Experience

by Carl Williams

The War on Drugs of the last two decades has been fought on many fronts. Spanning a period of intense national and transnational drug enforcement efforts, the war was spurred by President Reagan’s war-like pronouncements in 1986, “My generation will remember how America swung into action when we were attacked in World War II. The war was not just fought by the fellows flying the planes or driving the tanks…[but also] at home by a mobilized nation… Well, now we’re in another war for our freedom, and it’s time for all of us to pull together again” (Alexander, 1990). Despite many previous war-like efforts to control the consumption and trade of illicit substances in North America prior to the Reagan years,¹ the current war on drugs marks an unprecedented attempt both to pursue a drug-free society within the United States and to globalize the reach of domestic policies. Bewley-Taylor (1999) opines that illegal drugs have partially filled the vacuum created by the fall of Soviet communism, apparently providing America with an external adversary worthy of another continuous state of war. This opinion, though undoubtedly diminished by the preeminence of the current war on terror, nonetheless underscores the significance of the anti-drug campaign in America’s foreign and domestic policy.

Steeped in prohibitionist doctrine and with a predominant focus on supply reduction as the primary strategy for winning the battle against illegal drugs, the war on drugs has been widely acclaimed as unsuccessful. Pointing to the relative stability of both street prices and the demand for drugs as an indication of failed drug policy, critics of the drug war attribute its failure to a lack of attention to demand reduction, while others such as Reiman (2007) have questioned the ethics of drug policies that have led to an unprecedented growth in the prison population of the United States. Other scholars, specifically Youngers (2004: 362), acknowledge that “drug abuse and its related violence in the United States is home-grown and hence must be primarily addressed domestically,” and denounce U.S. policy for its exportation of the war on drugs, its globalization of domestic problems, and its misconceived solutions that have been foisted onto other countries.

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