Cross-Border Organized Crime and Human Rights: The Awfulness of Trafficking in Human Beings

This chapter intends to highlight the difficulties of the legal treatment of the crime of trafficking in human beings, especially because it is an invisible phenomenon and, in many cases, it takes place behind legal businesses, such as bars, clubs, etc. The problem of its criminal treatment is that it is a phenomenon full of ambivalences, conflicting interests, and generalisations that prevent seeing individualities, since it is concealed by other phenomena such as prostitution, sexual exploitation and illegal immigration. This has led to contradictory criminal policies that violate the rights of victims. The analysis focuses on the case of abusive trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation due to the vulnerability of the victim, considering that it is in those cases where the difficulty of differentiating between free prostitution and coercive prostitution arises, since the victim due to being in a situation of need, does not have full autonomy of her will. In accordance with international conventions, human dignity, as a human right is protected, which is intangible, in disregard of the personal will, when there are objective conditions of sexual exploitation.