By International Crisis Group

What’s new? On 6 June, Mexico will stage its largest-ever election day, with 21,000 contests nationwide. Opposition forces accuse President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of planning to deepen authoritarian rule should his allies prevail in the polls. Meanwhile, criminal groups exploit electoral competition in their quest for impunity and power. Why does it matter? The country’s politics are highly polarised, and its parties are weak and opportunistic. Criminal groups can use favours and threats to gain influence over future elected officials. Entanglements between government and organised crime that have long undermined security policies help perpetuate Mexico’s high levels of violence. What should be done? Severing links between criminals and state officials will be challenging, especially given the government’s apparent reticence to act. Still, outside actors should encourage investment in independent election oversight bodies and local institutions, and a shift toward tailored and less militarised policies to curb insecurity in Mexico’s most conflict-ridden areas.

Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2021. 33p.

By Marc Fabel and Helmut Rainer

This paper quantifies how much of violent crime in society can be attributed to football-related violence. We study the universe of professional football matches played out in Germany’s top three football leagues over the period 2011-2015. To identify causal effects, we leverage time-series and cross-sectional variation in crime register data, comparing the number of violent crimes on days with and without professional football matches while controlling for date heterogeneity, weather, and holidays. Our main finding shows that violent crime increases by 21.5 percent on a match day. In the regions and time period under consideration, professional football matches explain 8 percent of all violent assaults, and generate social costs of roughly 194 million euros. Exploring possible mechanisms, we establish that the match day effect cannot be explained by emotional cues stemming from either unsettling events during a match or unexpected game outcomes, nor is it driven by increases in domestic violence. Instead, we find that the match day effect can be attributed to violence among males in the 18-29 age group, rises to almost 70 percent on days with high-rivalry derby matches, and that a non-negligible share of it stems from violent assaults on police officers. These findings are inconsistent with frustration-aggression theories that can explain sports-related violence in the United States, but can be accommodated by social identity explanations of football hooliganism.

Munich: CESifo, 2021. 40p.

By LaVerle Berry. et al.

This report assesses conditions that contribute to or are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world during the period 1999-2002. Although the focus of the report is on transnational activity, domestic criminal activity is recognized as a key foundation for transnational crime, especially as the forces of globalization intensify. The report has been arranged geographically into the following major headings: Africa, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Within the geographical headings, the report addresses individual countries with particularly salient conditions. Cases such as the Triborder Area (TBA) of South America and East and West Africa, where conditions largely overlap national borders, have been treated as regions rather than by imposing an artificial delineation by country. The bibliography has been divided into the same geographical headings as the text. The major sources for this report are recent periodical reports from Western and regional sources, Internet sites offering credible recent information, selected recent monographs, and personal communications with regional experts. Treatment of individual countries varies according to the extent and seriousness of conditions under study. Thus some countries in a region are not discussed, and others are discussed only from the perspective of one or two pertinent activities or conditions. Because they border the United States, Canada and Mexico have received especially extensive treatment.

Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 2003. 260p.

By Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

Canonical models of criminal behavior highlight the importance of economic incentives and employment opportunities in determining participation in crime (Becker, 1968). Yet, deriving causal corroborating evidence from individual-level variation in employment incentives has proven challenging. We link rich administrative micro-data on socioeconomic measures of individuals with the universe of criminal arrests in Medellin over a decade. We test whether increasing the relative costs to formal-sector employment led to more crime. We exploit exogenous variation in formal employment around a socioeconomic score cutoff, below which individuals receive generous health benefits if not formally employed. Our regression discontinuity estimates show that this popular policy induced a fall in formal-sector employment and a corresponding spike in organized crime. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with more opportunities for organized crime. There are no effects on less economically motivated crimes.

Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2019. 57p.

By George W. Grayson

La Familia Michoacana burst onto the national stage on September 6, 2006, when ruffians crashed into the seedy Sol y Sombra nightclub in Uruapan, Michoacán, and fired shots into the air. They screamed at the revelers to lie down, ripped open a plastic bag, and lobbed five human heads onto the beer-stained black and white dance floor. The day before these macabre pyrotechnics, the killers seized their prey from a mechanic’s shop and hacked off their heads with bowie knives while the men writhed in pain. “You don’t do something like that unless you want to send a big message,” said a U.S. law-enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity about an act of human depravity that would “cast a pall over the darkest nooks of hell.” The desperados left behind a note hailing their act as “divine justice,” adding that: "The Family doesn't kill for money; it doesn't kill women; it doesn't kill innocent people; only those who deserve to die, die. Everyone should know . . . this is divine justice.” While claiming to do the “Lord’s work,” the ruthless leaders of this syndicate have emerged as the dominant exporter of methamphetamines to the United States, even as they control scores of municipalities in Michoacán and neighboring states.

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2010. 128p.

By Cynthia A. Olufade.

This book is based on Cynthia A. Olufade’s Master’s thesis ‘Oath taking and the transnationalism of silence among Edo female sex workers in Italy’, winner of the African Studies Centre, Leiden’s 2018 Africa Thesis Award. This annual award for Master’s students encourages student research and writing on Africa and promotes the study of African cultures and societies. This study aimed to interrogate the oath taking phenomena among Edo female sex workers in Italy. In a bid to understand how the oaths taken in Edo State, translates into an intangible aspect of the trafficking process. To achieve the aims of the study, the research utilised the qualitative method of data collection, it involved the use of in-depth interviews and observations. The study reveals that the transnational silence exhibited by different categories of actors in the Edo sex work network sustains the industry. The research also highlights that the oaths form only a part, albeit important of the construction of debt and bondage in the context of Edo transnational sex work. In light of its findings, the study concludes that the idea of transnationalism of silence is as effective as the oaths taken.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2020. 118p.

By the President’s Commission of Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.

“This report is about crime in America — about those who commit it, about those who are its victims, and about what can be done to reduce it….The existence of crime, the talk about crime, the reports of crime, and the fear of crime have eroded the basic quality of life of many Americans.” From the Summary.

Harrow and Heston Classic reprint. (1967) 342 pages.

By Jennifer Paterson, Mark A Walters, Rupert Brown, and Harriet Fearn.

This report summarises the findings from a five year research project, the Sussex Hate Crime Project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The aim was to examine the indirect impacts of hate crimes – how hate attacks on members of a community affect the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of other members of that community. The project focused on hate crimes targeted against LGB&T and Muslim communities and used a variety of different research methods, including questionnaire surveys, individual interviews and social psychological experiments.

Sussex, UK: University of Sussex, 2018. 54p.

By Minna Viuhko and Anniina Jokinen.

Research on human trafficking and organised crime is relatively rare in Finland. During the recent years human trafficking, procuring and prostitution have been studied i.a. in a legal perspective (Roth 2007a; 2007b; 2008), in relation to cross-border prostitution (Marttila 2004; 2005a; 2005b; 2006; 2008), and in the context of commercialisation of sex (Jyrkinen 2005). The problems of identifying the victims of human trafficking (Putkonen 2008) and trafficking in women and illegal immigration (Lehti and Aromaa 2003) have also been examined, as well as the effects of globalization on the sex industry in Finland (Penttinen 2004). In addition, Finnish sex-workers (Kontula 2008), prostitution in Northern Finland (Skaffari and Urponen 2004; Korhonen 2003), sex bars (Lähteenmaa and Näre 1994; Näre and Lähteenmaa 1995; Näre 1998), and sex buyers (Keeler & Jyrkinen 1999) have been the focus of recent research. Also organised pandering and prostitution in Finland was studied in the beginning of the 2000s (Leskinen 2003). Organised crime is scrutinised by Junninen (2006) and Bäckman (2006). However, the connection between human trafficking and organised crime has not been a central focus of any specific recent study in Finland. It also seems that prostitution and procuring markets have changed during the recent years and because of this, new studies on the issue are needed. Although human trafficking, prostitution and organised crime have been researched extensively in the global context, in this report we refer mainly to the earlier Finnish studies. The aim is to provide a comprehensive view of the Finnish prostitution-related human trafficking situation in the context of organised crime. We approach the topic from a sociological perspective and with qualitative methods. This study covers the first decade of the 21st century.

Helsinki: European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control (HEUNI), 2009. 143p.

By Harald Dern, Roland Frönd, Ursula Straub, Jens Vick and Rainer Witt.

“The perpetrator isn’t from here!” This claim is an understandable defensive response exhibited by local people following a sexual homicide,1 particularly in cases involving a child victim. The contention is grounded more in belief than in knowledge, however, as very few of the perpetrators who are later identified travelled a great distance to the crime scene. One occasionally encounters this notion in police circles as well, and it often makes the process of identifying the perpetrator even more difficult. When cases of this kind remain unsolved, the investigating unit in charge frequently requests the appropriate operational case analysis unit to perform a case analysis.2 As a rule, such cases analyses include the development of an offender profile containing, to the extent possible, statements about the unidentified perpetrator’s probable age, prior criminal record and place or region of residence. These criteria within the offender profile are of utmost importance to local investigative authorities. On the basis of a combination of these criteria, which can be researched in databases, analysts can, for example, identify a group of potential suspects and/or establish a scale of priorities within a known group of suspects (keyword “profiling”).

Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt , 2005. 101p.

By Rebecca Stern.

In Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England, Rebecca Stern establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Although Victorian England is famous for revering the domestic realm as a sphere separate from the market and its concerns, actual households were hardly isolated havens of fiscal safety and innocence. Rather, the Victorian home was inevitably a marketplace, a site of purchase, exchange, and employment in which men and women hired or worked as servants, contracted marriages, managed children, and obtained furniture, clothing, food, and labor. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Stern argues that the climate of fraud permeated Victorian popular ideologies about social transactions. Beyond providing a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, Home Economics illustrates the diverse means by which Victorian culture engaged with, refuted, celebrated, represented, and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 207p.

By Pérouse de Montclos.

Most of the academic literature on violence in Nigeria is qualitative. It rarely relies on quantitative data because police crime statistics are not reliable, or not available, or not even published. Moreover, the training of Nigerian social scientists often focuses on qualitative, cultural, and political issues. There is thus a need to bridge the qualitative and quantitative approaches of conflict studies.This book represents an innovation and fills a gap in this regard. It is the first to introduce a discussion on such issues in a coherent manner, relying on a database that fills the lacunae in data from the security forces. The authors underline the necessity of a trend analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in very different fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents, land conflicts to witchcraft, and so on. In addition, they argue for empirical investigation and a complementary approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. The book is therefore organized into two parts, with a focus first on statistical studies, then on fieldwork.

Leiden: African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), 2016. 217p.

Edited by CALS (Coalition of African Lesbians) and AMSHeR.

Violence against sexual minorities in Africa is rife. Persons belonging to or perceived to be members of the broad grouping ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI)’ are often victim of violence in African states. This violence is sometimes perpetrated by state actors, such as the members of the Police force, and more often by ordinary persons (non-state actors). By condoning violence by state actors, and by failing to diligently investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of these acts, states fail to respect the basic right to security of some of its citizens. By condoning these actions, or by failing to act effectively, the state also violates its human rights obligations. The argument of this report is not that sexual minorities deserve special protection, but that they are entitled to the rights all other citizens have – the right to security, liberty, life, dignity, and a fair trial.

As members of the African Union, states are party to and should abide by their obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter). Like several other regional and international human rights instruments, the African Charter guarantees freedom from discrimination, and equal protection and equality of individuals and peoples’ before the law (articles 2, 3 and 19). The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), the body monitoring compliance with the African Charter, has in various communications presented to it denounced acts of discrimination on several of the listed grounds of discrimination and has clearly established that ‘other status’ (in article 2 of the Charter) can be broadly interpreted to include grounds other than those explicitly listed under that provision of the African Charter. The Commission made its first pronouncement on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues in its Concluding Observations on Cameroon’s periodic report of 2005 by expressing concern about the upsurge in intolerance towards sexual minorities. Most recently, the Chairperson of the Commission issued a statement on in April 2013 stating that the he Commission ‘equally denounces violence committed against individuals based on their sexual orientation as part of its mandate to protect individuals from all forms of violence’.

Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 57p.

Edited by Judith van Erp.

Corporate crimes seem endemic to modern society. Newspapers are filled on a daily basis with examples of financial manipulation, accounting fraud, food fraud, cartels, bribery, toxic spills and environmental harms, corporate human rights violations, insider trading, privacy violations, discrimination, corporate manslaughter or violence, and, recently, software manipulation. Clearly, the problem of corporate crime transcends the micro level of the individual ‘rotten apple’ (Ashforth et al. 2008; Monahan and Quinn 2006); although corporate crimes are ultimately committed by individual members of an organization, they have more structural roots, as the enabling and justifying organizational context in which they take place plays a defining role. Accounts of corporate fraud, misrepresentation, or deception that foreground individual offender’s motivations and characteristics, often fail to acknowledge that organizational decisions are more than the aggregation of individual choices and actions, and that organizations are more than simply the environment in which individual action takes place.

Basel: MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2018. 152p.

By Ralph Espach, Daniel Haering, Javier Melendez Quinonez, and Miguel Castillo Giron.

The Dilemma of Lawlessness explores in-depth three towns typical of Guatemala’s border regions and examines the economic, political, and security effects of the amplification of the drug trade in their streets, across their rivers, and on their footpaths. The cases reveal that trade has brought prosperity, but also danger, as illegal profits penetrate local businesses, government offices, and churches as longstanding local smuggling networks must contend with or accommodate the interests of Mexican cartels. The authors argue persuasively for the importance of cultivating local community capital to strengthen these communities’ resiliency in the face of these threats.

Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press (MCUP), 2016. 104p.

By Frederick Howard Wines.

"Miscellaneous documents of the House of Representatives for the first session of the fifty-second Congress, 1891-92, volume 50, part 14…..This entire report treats of prisons, juvenile reformatories; almshouses; and benevolent institutions, together with insane paupers in institutions for the insane."

Washington, DC: GPO, 1896. 440p.

By W.L. Fisher.

Philadelphia: The following pages were written during the severe weather of late winter, when the sufferings of the poor became so interesting a subject of enquiry. …I impugn neither the motives nor philanthropy of those who differ from me….”

Self published. 1831. 119p.

By Albert W. Elliott.

“In the following pages, I purpose to lay bare the stark facts of the Social Evil, believing that public knowledge of conditions as they really are will prove a power for good; I will strive to tell the unflinching truth, pitiless though it appears, for therein lies the world’s only hope of freedom from error and vice. This book, my reader, is meat for strong men, not milk for babes. The author has devoted six years of his life to rescue work among fallen women, has studied the underworld from New Orleans to New York, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; has entered on the course of his mission, more than three thousand houses of shame and talked with more than fifteen thousand inmates ; he has walked the valley of this terrible shadow meeting its blackened spirits face to face, searching their innermost secrets, praying and working for their deliverance, and crying from the depth of his soul over the hopeless tragedy of it all. Of the intimate, accurate, heart-crushing ex- perience thus gathered, this book is a faithful record.”

Atlanta, GA: Webb & Vary Co., 1914..

By Pankhuri Agarwal.

Working with a simplistic notion of release from bondage as “freedom”, mainstream anti-trafficking activists focus on rescue. They argue that victims of trafficking are “free” once removed from their employers. Critics contest this approach and argue that significantly less attention is paid to the role of the state and the NGOs in producing conditions due to which people remain vulnerable. This research lends empirical support to this critical position through a multi-sited ethnography of informal migrant workers, sex workers, and law enforcement officers, traversing through courtrooms, police stations, district welfare offices, worksites, shelter homes, and offices of NGOs, in New Delhi, India. It corroborates that the authority of law is compromised ‘on ground’ and is actively negotiated within the legal space of anti-trafficking efforts. Instead of being instantly transported to “freedom”, the workers end up in protracted legal proceedings, ranging two to thirty-seven years, to seek justice and rights. Their rights are neglected due to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Their mobility is restricted due to improper documentation. Their suffering is intensified through an evasive legal system. The result – arbitrary, unjust legal outcomes after an endless wait and dependence on intermediaries. In fact, their journey through the system, with cost and time overruns, has no direct or precise chronology, and often moves in a circle rather than reaching an end. The workers resemble the class of people that Denise Ferreira da Silva (2009) describes as “nobodies”. They continue to struggle to achieve the rights and recognition that would allow them to escape this status. The combination of empirical data, doctrinal analysis, and socio-legal theory in this research provide an insight on the harm and limits of the anti-trafficking discourse with reference to India.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2021. 233p.

By Jon Spencer, Rose Broad, Kauko Aromaa et. al.

This report was completed some time ago but for reasons beyond our control its publication has been delayed until now. The issue of the illegal movement of people retains its topicality and continues to be equally relevant as it was at the time of the project fieldwork. For example, recently, HEUNI has completed a further report on the FLEX project (Trafficking for Forced Labour and Labour Exploitation in Finland, Poland and Estonia, HEUNI Publication No. 68), and the report on trafficking for sexual exploitation published by The Swedish Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), accompanied by a Finnish country report published as HEUNI report No. 62 also indicate the importance of this area of research. The research reported on here was innovative as it included law enforcement practitioners and authority representatives in a constant dialogue with researchers. The aim was that this would allow for discussion of the data as it was gathered throughout the project. The intention was that data collection and interpretation formed a permanently iterative, self-correcting process and to some extent this was achieved. It was also an aim that the Expert Groups created for the project would continue once the research phase was completed in order to maximise the sharing of information and to sustain a dialogue between different professional groups. This aim proved to be over optimistic as there were too many problems caused by information sharing. It would seem that without external pressure and support, such formal cross-authority forms of co-operation do not survive spontaneously. The same could be observed in the context of the FLEX project. Our conclusion is that should such “horizontal” groups be created they will only continue if there is a budget and a responsible coordinating body established on a permanent basis. If not, the sustainability of such co-operative relationships is low.

Helsinki: European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control (HEUNI), 2011. 110p.