Human trafficking in Spain: A quantitative case-law analysis

Human trafficking was criminalised in Spain in 2010. Since then, limited work has been done on the quantification and identification of this phenomenon. Those that do exist, moreover, are based on incomplete data, and consist only of cases formally identified by the police, which have a very clear bias towards trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. In an effort to increase empirical knowledge, this paper presents the results of a quantitative study of all the judgments (N = 221) delivered by Spanish Provincial Courts in human trafficking cases between 2011 and 2019 available in the Spanish Judicial Documentation Centre's (CENDOJ) public case-law database. The aim of the research was to determine how many cases of human trafficking had been tried in court and the types of trafficking involved in order to compare that information with the data reported in prevalence studies. The results confirm what previous research has shown. In this sense, the relationship between the nationalities of defendants and victims is confirmed. Also, the fact that the Spanish criminal justice system is too focused on trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation, whose victims represent 85% of known cases. The victims detected, in contrast to what is indicated by UNODC (2020), are mostly foreign women. This work therefore highlights the need to address the prosecution of human trafficking in a more holistic way, in which cases of trafficking for labour exploitation or cases involving Spanish victims would not be hidden.This research was funded under the project RTI2018-094686-B-C21, from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities