Human traffickers in the UK and Australia: a comparative study on criminal trajectories.

There has been global interest in human trafficking from political actors to NGOs (Elliott, 2015). Human trafficking is a complex and multifaceted transnational crime, generally linked to the rise of globalisation and migration flows (Atasu-Topcuolu, 2015; Shelley, 2010). Australia and the UK are considered to be tier 1 countries meaning they rank highly in their efforts in combating human trafficking, however both countries deal with quite different migration flows (Department of State, 2017). It has been suggested human trafficking will increase after Brexit due to the demise of free movement (ATMG, 2017). So far, most studies into human trafficking have focused on the victims (Contreras, Kallivayalil and Herman, 2017; Elliott, 2015), while the offending pathways of a human trafficker is still poorly understood (Board 2015).

This research seeks to address this gap by developing a comparative study investigating criminal trajectories in the UK and Australia by looking at the 'push' and 'pull' factors that contribute to an individual becoming a human trafficker.

The research will take a hermeneutic interpretivist approach focusing on qualitative research (Bryman, 2016). Interviews will be conducted with human traffickers, criminal justice agencies and NGOs to gain a holistic perspective as to what factors may contribute to an individual becoming a human trafficker and if these factors differ in the respective countries. I will conduct content analysis on documents such as judicial records and media publications to highlight demographic characteristics of human traffickers. The collected data will be transcribed and coded to identify key themes for analysis.