Human trafficking for forced criminality is a subset of trafficking crime that has seen explosive growth in recent years. This trend can make the process of identifying and prosecuting trafficking crime a challenging and murky process. Understanding human trafficking and forced criminality makes it easier to delineate perpetrators from those they have targeted.
What is forced criminality?
Forced criminality, also known as criminal exploitation, occurs when a victim of human trafficking is forced to engage in illegal activities for economic or other gain for traffickers.
Victims can be trafficked for the purposes of forced criminality specifically, or they may be forced to engage in criminal activities as a component of other forms of human trafficking. This can include forced cybercrimes, drug trafficking, theft, violent crimes, and criminalized forms of sex work.
Forced criminality is a less broadly understood type of human trafficking. It has become steadily more prevalent in the past decade, according to the 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (GLOTIP) published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). According to the UNODC, this type of trafficking has been identified in approximately 25 countries across all regions of the world. Because the UNODC reports on detected cases only, forced criminality likely occurs far more often.
Based on GLOTIP data representing a total of 63,962 victims detected in 133 countries and territories in 2022, trafficking for forced criminality accounted for 8% of cases — an increase from 1% of total detected victims in 2016 and 6% of total detected victims in 2018. These numbers are higher in certain geographical regions. For example, 22% of total detected victims in Western and Southern Europe were trafficked for forced criminality.
”“Growing in strength and sophistication, criminal networks have expanded their markets and operations to include the exploitation and trafficking in persons (TIP) of thousands of people for mass-scale financial fraud operations — trafficking for forced criminality — a phenomenon that is intertwined with cybercrime, financial fraud, extortion, the laundering of billions of dollars of illicit profits, and corruption embedded in private and public sectors.”
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
While we focus on victims of trafficking in this article, we acknowledge that there may be two sets of victims in multi-layered cases of trafficking for forced criminality. Two examples:
- A person being trafficked who is forced to steal then creates a secondary victim of theft as well.
- Trafficked workers forced to perpetrate cybercrimes such as online scams and financial fraud target a secondary set of victims who face devasting financial and psychological consequences because of these crimes.
In this article, we will focus on the first set: the individuals who are trafficked.
Who is being trafficked for forced criminality?
In trafficking for the purpose of forced criminality, targets have expanded beyond the historical focus on women and children to men and boys. 2022 UNODC data reported that detected victims of forced criminality are overwhelmingly males, especially boys (68%). Adult men comprise another 24%.
This is particularly evident in trafficking for forced criminality through cyber scamming — the fastest growing form of human trafficking — where traffickers are exploiting the skills of men (and some women) who have backgrounds in technical education. Many criminal networks house operations inside scamming compounds located in Southeast Asia, with victims recruited from all over the world.
Freedom Collaborative provided an overview of the countries of origin of these recruits and the destinations where they are usually trafficked for forced criminality, revealing that the highest concentration comes from Southeast Asia and Africa. Interpol provided a review of primary and secondary trafficking hubs for online scams and human trafficking, as well as other affected countries. Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar are primary hubs.
Forced criminality pathways
In general, traffickers may coerce adults and children to commit crimes during their victimization. These acts may then be used by traffickers as leverage to threaten survivors not to disclose their situation to police or other authorities, keeping them trapped.
The pathways through forced criminality look different depending on the types of crime that traffickers are forcing targets to engage in. Here are two common scenarios of forced criminality.
Labor trafficking: cybercrime
Southeast Asia reported that “hundreds of thousands of people from across the region and beyond have been forcibly engaged in online criminality.”
Traffickers recruit and exploit people through many methods, often preying on the financial, systemic, and emotional vulnerabilities of prospective victims. The story of Ajay* resembles that of Ahmad and Sinta, who shared their experiences of trafficking for forced criminality in Thailand. Recently, The Exodus Road assisted in the escape and repatriation of Phelipe and Luckas, Brazilians who were trafficked to Myanmar. All were forced to contribute to online scams.
An article by Sarka and Shukla (2024) presented the common methods through which traffickers use cybercrime to recruit victims.
In the first scenario, traffickers lure individuals with false, seemingly lucrative job opportunities. Applicants often even go through a formal interview process, followed by receiving a job offer that may include the benefit of covering victims’ flight expenses to their assigned destination.
However, upon arrival in the destination country, these hopeful people are coerced into carrying out internet scams. Traffickers make them conduct criminal activities by confiscating travel and identity documents, imposing arbitrary debts, restricting access to basic resources, threatening or enacting physical violence, and providing constant surveillance by armed guards.
In these cases, trafficking sufferers become both targets and unwilling perpetrators of cybercrime. Escape is increasingly difficult in these scenarios. Workers who are non-compliant may be punished in various ways, “resold” to other organized crime networks, or subjected to sex trafficking.
The sex trafficking to prison pipeline.
The sexual exploitation (or sex trafficking) to prison pipeline refers to a systemic trend in which survivors of sexual violence (or sex trafficking) are criminalized rather than provided with support. A report titled The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story discusses how girls who are victims of sex trafficking are routed into the juvenile justice system due to their victimization, where they are punished as perpetrators rather than recognized and supported as survivors.
Rights4Girls has also uncovered how circumstances and outcomes related to sex trafficking of youth (i.e., being forced to skip school, running away, etc.) may lead victims to become involved with the law. At this point, they are punished for the outcomes of their circumstances rather than recognized as victims of sex trafficking.
Clark and colleagues (2023), through the knowledge of lived experience experts, provided an example of how a trafficker may force victims to engage in different illegal activities:
Barriers to identification and support
Survivors of forced criminality are often seen as offenders rather than victims of a crime. As a result, they may be hesitant to reach out to law enforcement due to fear that they will be held responsible for the crimes that they were forced to commit.
These factors can hinder the identification of forced criminality:
- Fear of law enforcement: trafficking survivors who were forced to commit crimes may avoid seeking support from law enforcement due to past negative systemic experiences, distrust of the criminal justice system, fear of deportation (in the case of international trafficking victims), and threats from traffickers.
- Misidentification as offenders: survivors are frequently treated as criminals rather than victims, resulting in wrongful prosecution, punishment, and harm instead of receiving support from systems that are meant to help, such as the criminal justice system. A 2022 study by Reis, et al found that for survivors of sex trafficking, police officers — who are usually the first people to interact on the scene and discern whether individuals are prostitution offenders or human trafficking victims — more often misidentified younger victims when force was not explicitly stated, as well as older victims even when force was explicitly stated.
- Inability to seek help: survivors of human trafficking, including trafficking for forced criminality, are often heavily controlled and monitored. They may have had their phones and other means of external communication taken away.
- Stigma and burden of proof: demonstrating coercion is challenging, especially when people are forced to commit crimes, which can reinforce societal and legal biases against them.
- Legal gaps: Inadequate legal protections result in victims being prosecuted under criminal laws rather than being recognized and supported as trafficking survivors (Countryman-Roswurm et al., 2024a). Moreover, in cases of international trafficking, victims whose travel documents have been confiscated often have no choice but to overstay their visas. As a result, they may fear fines, legal repercussions, and limited repatriation assistance — concerns that, unfortunately, prove valid in many cases.
Impact of forced criminality on survivors
Both survivors of trafficking for forced criminality and trafficking survivors who are forced to commit crimes during other forms of trafficking experience many harmful consequences.
When victims of trafficking are charged and incarcerated as offenders, this can be retraumatizing on multiple levels. A sex trafficking survivor’s story shared in The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story report reveals how her experience of incarceration was retraumatizing:
“Suffering, isolated, tired, and helpless at the age of 15, the concrete box that represented my cell in Zenoff Hall, the girls’ section the largest of the juvenile facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, seemed no less invasive than the horror of the streets. As much of a real physical confinement as it was, it wasn’t all too different than the mental confinement I endured from my pimp. I was interrogated for hours on end, reminded that my opinions didn’t matter, and locked in like a dog in a kennel. Unless I was saying the answers to the questions that they wanted to hear, my voice was irrelevant.
Skip ahead a few years later, I endured it again in California, only that time experiencing my seventeenth birthday within the juvenile hall walls. Both times I was faced with charges of solicitation and/or prostitution, a crime that as a minor who wasn’t of legal age to consent to sex, couldn’t seriously be charged to commit. But yet, there I was, facing them. To my agony, I comprehended this as yet another system that failed me … I was re-traumatized every day in detention while having to be watched, fully nude, while I showered. No one assessed me or ever even asked me what got me there, no rehabilitation services were offered. I just sat locked in a box while being interrogated and talked-down to.”
— Withelma “T” Ortiz Walker Pettigrew
Beyond the mental and physical health challenges common among human trafficking survivors, those forced into criminal activities also face the consequences of having a criminal record. These challenges can include hindered access to employment, housing, and legal residency, and reduced ability to seek and receive victim protection and support services due to their lack of recognition as victims.
Recommendations for fighting forced criminality
With the rise in trafficking for forced criminality, the UNODC has made several urgent recommendations for change. Some of them are already underway. These suggested shifts include:
- International, cross-sector collaboration is needed to envision new mechanisms to respond to a rise in forced labor and forced criminality. See what the UNODC is currently doing to address transnational organized crime.
- Law enforcement officials should be thoroughly trained to recognize human trafficking. Victims of sex trafficking, including youth, continue to be charged and held in custody for prostitution-related charges, even though some countries have changed laws to distinguish between voluntary prostitution and sex trafficking. Research has shown that police training improved officer identification of human trafficking in arrests for prostitution charges (Reis et al., 2022).
- Favorable conditions must be created so survivors of trafficking do not fear seeking support from law enforcement. In a UNODC survey of NGOs and CSOs, the following improvements were suggested:
- Using the non-punishment principle
- Recognizing that compliance with reporting cannot jeopardize a survivor’s status as a victim
- Supporting survivors through the third-party presence of advocates and social workers
- Refraining from threatening forced repatriation, while making voluntary repatriation an option
- Providing safe, anonymous reporting tiplines
- Private citizens should become familiar with the warning signs of all forms of human trafficking, as anyone can be forced to commit criminal activities — see our article for warning signs of different forms of human trafficking.
- Survivor leaders have suggested that to combat the continued unjust criminalization of trafficking survivors, the anti-trafficking movement needs to move beyond awareness to intentional social justice advocacy efforts (Countryman-Roswurm et al., 2024b). This includes introducing the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act as part of the 2024 reauthorization of the TVPA. The act would provide vacatur of certain convictions sustained as a direct result of exploitation.
