  | Introduction to the special issue on
¡Human Smuggling and Trafficking¢
by Georgios A. Antonopoulos,
GUEST EDITORS
of "the art of crime" issue 3,
May 2011
The focus of this special issue of "The Art of Crime" is ¡Human Smuggling and Trafficking¢, issues that particularly since the early 1990s have been at the epicentre of media, public, political and scientific debates despite the long history of the phenomena. Generally, human smuggling and trafficking has been viewed through the prism of ¡organised crime¢, ¡threat¢ and danger.
Thus, since the early 1990s we have been bombarded with media stories about people being smuggled or trafficked within the context of the huge migration movements around the world, and we have been alerted to the ¡threats¢ that these two forms of ¡organised crime¢ pose both to human and national security.
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´Organised Crime´ as a ´Productive Force´
Human Smuggling and Trafficking, and the Economy in Greece
by Georgios Papanicolaou,
Senior Lecturer in Criminology,
School of Social Sciences and Law,
Teesside University, UK
& Georgios A. Antonopoulos,
Reader in Criminology,
School of Social Sciences and Law,
Teesside University, UK
The aim of the article is to question the prevalent notion of ¡organised crime¢ by exploring how the social organisation of human smuggling and trafficking is adaptive and functional to structures of the Greek economy. ...
The chapter is based on a variety of official and ¡unofficial¢ sources of data: official statistics from the Greek authorities; interviews with law enforcement agen-cies; interviews with migrants and employers of documented and undocumented migrants as well as interviews with two migrant smugglers.
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International aspects of organised human smuggling and trafficking
Trafficking in People for Sexual Exploitation from Bulgaria
by Georgi Petrunov,
Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Risk Monitor Foundation, Sofia, Bulgaria
Bulgaria is one of the most severely affected countries by human trafficking for sexual exploitation...Europol (2008) identifies Bulgaria as one of the six main source countries of victims who are trafficked within the EU, along with Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Nigeria and Moldova. ... Data from the Supreme Prosecutor´s Office of Cassation of Bulgaria confirms the findings of international reports that the basic form of human trafficking among the identified cases is sexual exploitation.
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Entrepreneurship and Networking in the Trafficking of Sex Workers from East to West Europe
Cases from Belgium (2002-2008)
by Johan Leman and Stef Janssens,
Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
This paper tries to elucidate the results of studying entrepreneurship and networking among sex workers in Belgium (particularly in and around the area of Brussels North station prostitution district around the ¡Rue d¢Aerschot¢). Here are the findings of a study at 25 juridical files, from an entrepreneurship and networking point of view...
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The involvement of Chinese human smugglers in other forms of crime:
A critical evaluation of 88 court cases
by Melvin Soudijn,
Senior Researcher at the National Crime Squad
of the Netherlands Police Agency
Interviews with illegal migrants prove that they are generally not the hopeless victims they are thought to be. In other words, the conclusions based on academic fieldwork are clearly in contradiction with the slavery scenario. One wonders which view is the more accurate. Do migrants regularly fall victim to smugglers or are such reports exaggerated?
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| |  Fighting corruption in Italy and Greece
Feasible and efficient measures (legislative, administrative, etc.) against corruption: The Italian example.
by Grazia Mannozzi,
Università dell¢Insubria
Como, Italia
Fighting corruption and the crimes which are in a strict, functional inter-dependence with corruption itself (for example: false accounting and money laundering) represents one of the main criminal policy aims at both national and international level...
Given the super-national anti-corruption normative frame and the essential terminological and structural clarifications, it¢s time to move from a synthesis of the quantitative analysis of corruption in Italy, to show how corruption has been discovered and fought over a period of 20 years and to evaluate the strategies that could better address the problem.
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Confronting Corruption in Greece
by Professor Nestor Courakis,
Faculty of Law,
University of Athens, Greece
Greece is a country which, according to the 2010 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, is ranked among the countries considered as particularly corrupt (78th globally and bottom of European countries). Of course there are a lot of reservations whether this subjective ascertainment can lead to the conclusion that Greece is really a corrupt country.
By the term ¡subjective¢ I mean, that the Index is based only on the criterion of perception. Hence, it merely shows how the people of a country perceive their own corruption, on the basis of several factors which shape their opinion...
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