Human trafficking has been at the forefront of policies and campaigns since the passing of the United Nations’ Palermo Protocol in 2000. However, studies and analyses on human trafficking have been overwhelmingly limited in scope and approach since the anti-trafficking movement began. The truth about the involuntary exploitation of human beings by other human beings goes much further back in history than is often usually thought, despite the alleged novelty of this global crime. Also, the frame used to assess and combat trafficking was initially limited (namely by sex and trafficking type), and the fight to broaden it to include all forms of modern-day slavery is difficult and ongoing. This book aims to bring these issues together through a meta-study analysis that incorporates numerous international sources, such as the annual Trafficking in Persons Report and the Global Slavery Index. By looking closely at the definition of human trafficking and the application and implementation of trafficking laws, reviewing human exploitation over the millennia, identifying limitations and obstacles, and incorporating new avenues of research and rhetoric, this book offers readers a comprehensive approach to human trafficking.

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2024. Cambridge Scholars. Buy Online

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This book offers a novel approach to understanding the dynamics of gang criminality in the Northern Triangle. It maintains that the crimes of gang violence and the crimes of human trafficking intertwine and intersect to perpetuate an environment of trauma, exploitation, and hopelessness that leaves thousands trapped without viable options—as refugees, conscripted into gang work, forced into criminality, incarcerated, extra-judicially executed, tortured, “disappeared,” or their lives forfeit for gang reputation. 

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2022. Lexington Books. Buy online.

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Nicaragua faces a crisis of democracy. Daniel Ortega has risen as the newest dictator in Latin America and might well be signaling a new wave of dictatorships in the region. His climb to power has been decades in the making, but between the response to the 2018 protests, to the 2020 pandemic, and his latest ‘election’ in 2021, it has become quite clear that Ortega and his regime represent a rising authoritarian power in Nicaragua. Citizens are facing repression, exile, arrest, and death for even expressing disdain at the administration. Many have become enemies of the state. Several groups are particularly ‘at risk.’ In this paper, the lens is through health service workers who are viewed as ‘oppositional’ to the Ortega regime and are facing severe consequences. Violent repression has become the norm, and Nicaragua's classification as a police state is excessively obvious through data and lived experiences of health care workers. Disloyalty is punished expediently, and many health workers have found themselves under surveillance, fired, forced out of jobs, forced to flee, detained, or killed. Foreign governments and international powers are hesitant to take any formal action against the regime. Nicaragua faces the rising power of authoritarian government as witnessed through repression and quelling of health care professionals and other entities of civil society.

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2024. Social Sciences & Humanities Open. Read here

The study presented here covers the issue of gangs and intersectionality with other factors that perpetuate conditions of human exploitation, touches on possible intervention strategies, and finally criticizes the continued use of iron-fisted policies over social interventions. Studies support that mano dura is an ineffective and counter-productive anti-gang strategy, but indicators are pointing toward a resurgence of this brand of counter-violence as President Giammattei calls for an attack on gangs “with all the weight and rigor that the law will allow.”  

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2022. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work. Read here

Trafficking in persons is a criminal enterprise that affects virtually every country in the world. Gangs in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala use coercion and force to establish and maintain control over victims within the gangs’ immediate area of control in ways that reflect the desires and needs of the gang rather than transporting them across borders in response to international market demands. In this paper, we provide an overview of gangs’ practices of coercing young males into criminal servitude and young females into ultra-violent, exploitative relationships and argue that such practices constitute a non-traditional model of human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

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2020. Journal of Human Trafficking, co-author with Tom Boerman. Read online.

Costa Rica has historically faced many of the same challenges as its Central American neighbors, but to a less dramatic extent. Even today, it outperforms its neighbors, often including its more developed neighbors, like the United States, in essential measurements of human development, happiness, lack of corruption, and economics. Although Costa Rican development has not been without its complications, issues, and bloody epochs, it has been far less extreme and far more open to change, democracy, and progress. Yet along with progress comes continued struggles. Costa Rica faces new challenges in the 21st century. In the new millennium, it confronts issues of social injustice, rising crime rates, economic dependency on international monetary institutions, corruption, and human rights, to name a few.

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2020. Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics, Oxford University Press. Read online.