Ethical Concerns in Research on Human Trafficking

This book presents a vivid description of the solutions that researchers have discovered for ethical dilemmas that pose themselves at studying disadvantaged, vulnerable and victimized populations. Ethical codes prescribe that the scholar should in all circumstances avoid potential harm, that informed consent is necessary and that the limits of confidentiality should always be respected. However, in the practice of research among women involved in prostitution, illegal immigrant workers, enslaved children, people who sell their organs and all the traffickers thereof, the ethical rules cannot always be followed. This book shows that there is a surprising variety of arguable possibilities in dealing with ethical dilemmas in the field. Authors reflect on concrete experiences from their own fieldwork in a wide variety of settings such as the USA, Singapore, Kosovo and The Netherlands. Some choose to work on the basis of conscientious partiality, others negotiate the rules with their informants and still others purposely break the rules in order to disclose and damage the exploiters. Researchers may find themselves in a vulnerable position. Their experiences, as presented in this volume, will help field workers, university administrators, representatives of vulnerable groups, philosophers of ethics and most of all students to go into the field well-prepared.

This is a book that every researcher planning to do fieldwork in the difficult field of hidden, illicit and victimized people should read in advance.

Dr. Frank Bovenkerk, Professor (Emeritus), Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

This book allows a peek in the kitchen of empirical fieldwork, going into not only “best practices,” but mistakes made, in a frank, courageous and honest way.

Dr. Brenda C. Oude Breuil, Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

Dina Siegel is a professor of Criminology and chair of the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the VU University, Amsterdam. She has published on the Russian mafia, human trafficking, legalized prostitution, underground banking, XTC trafficking, terrorism, crimes in the diamond industry, and the role of women in criminal organizations. Her most recent books are Traditional Organized Crime in the Modern World (with Henk van de Bunt), Springer, 2012;  Mobile banditry. East and Central European Itinerant Criminal Groups in the Netherlands, Eleven International Publishing, 2014. She also published different articles on the position of sex workers and on ethnographic research on prostitution in the Netherlands.

Roos de Wildt is conducting her PhD research in Cultural and Global Criminology at Utrecht University, The Netherlands and the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is studying prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes in Kosovo. The aim of this project is to explore how war and a transition process shape these phenomena. She conducted further ethnographic fieldwork on the trafficking of Romanian women to Italy after Romania entered the European Union, the future perspectives of youth in post-conflict Guatemala, prostitution in the Dutch municipality of Almere, child trafficking in The Netherlands and the closing of 

designated prostitution areas in Utrecht, The Netherlands. After obtaining her Master of Science in Cultural Anthropology Roos worked as an international project manager at NGOs between 2007 and 2011, during which she was mainly responsible for the implementation of projects in Central and Eastern Europe.