Do They Try: Why do some countries try harder than others in preventing human trafficking?

Abstract

Human trafficking is a prevalent and global problem. It is not a simple case of smuggling people across borders illegally, rather it involves a multitude of crimes including human rights abuses. Thus making it a relevant and severe problem that needs to be treated. To address this problem countries need to be involved and need to cooperate internationally which brings us to the question that we are attempting to answer. That is why do some countries try harder than others in preventing human trafficking? The field of human trafficking is difficult and complex as a result of limited research. Be that as it may, there is sufficient literature that have identified globalization as a recurring theme in human trafficking. Since it encourages the factors that have already existed that would allow for the continued existence and facilitation of human trafficking. These factors, or independent variables, that we have chosen and identified for the purposes of this research are: physical integrity rights, ethnic fractionalization, net oil export value per capita, corruption and democracy. We chose these specific variables to be analyzed, there was available data and, moreover, they showed to have a significant influence on the levels of human trafficking. For this project, though, our aim is to find out why some countries try harder than others in preventing human trafficking. We hypothesize that countries with a high percentage of these independent variables will have high levels of human trafficking than those who do not. To this end, each independent variable will be tested against the dependent variable, which are the tier rankings reported by the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Victims Protection Act (TVPA) reports. Ultimately, we want to see what set of conditions can lead to a country to have high levels of human trafficking.