Women represent the majority of trafficking victims, so not many people would expect them to participate in the trafficking of others. However, contrary to popular belief, women are not just trafficking victims, but also traffickers and recruiters. According to a United Nations Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, “a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers… Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime. This fact needs to be addressed, especially the cases where former victims have become perpetrators.” Trafficking survivor Chiquita Tillman supported this statement in an interview with Stop Modern Day Slavery by explaining that female traffickers are more common than people realize, saying, “There’s more female recruiters and traffickers than is widely known. You think about it as mostly men, but it’s a lot of women traffickers out there.”
Why Women Become Recruiters and Traffickers
When discussing how women can become traffickers or recruiters, survivor Elizabeth Quiroz has revealed that being exploited can lead to a distorted understanding of right and wrong. Her personal experience emphasizes that when being trafficked is the only life a person knows, it may seem reasonable (and even beneficial) to bring others into that life.
At the age of 16, Quiroz had been abused at home and trafficked by the man she considered her boyfriend. After she was arrested for robbery and placed in a group home, she planned to return to her trafficker. Another young girl in the facility wanted to go with her, and Quiroz agreed.
Looking back, Quiroz understands that this decision came from a lifetime of abuse and conditioning:
“In my head, I thought I was doing the right thing by bringing her along. I thought I was going to make my boyfriend proud. I thought I was going to help her because she was going to make money with me. And I already knew she was going to sleep with people with me, but that was my mentality because I didn’t know any better – that’s what I was trained to do.”
While the young girl did not end up being trafficked, Quiroz’s experience sheds light on how the coercion of trafficking can reshape victims’ understanding of their situation.
“In reality, some female traffickers don’t know that that’s not right, they think it’s a way of living because they’re so trained to do it. I was recruiting this girl – she was 12 years old, and I was 16 – I was recruiting her in group home and didn’t even know I was recruiting her,” Quiroz said. She also noted that that non-trafficked women in coercive romantic relationships may enter the world of trafficking by helping their boyfriends traffic others.
Tillman provided further insight into the ways women might conceptualize the choice to traffic others. Speaking about a victimized young woman of her acquaintance who in turn became a trafficker, Tillman said, “Her rationale was, ‘It was done to me and I’m going to do it to others and make the money’ because she wasn’t allowed to keep her money. So, when she became the trafficker, she was getting the money . . . And I’m sure she did not understand the damage that she was doing to these young girls. But the only thing that can rationalize is it was done to them – because it’s like a cycle. If you’re in that life for so long, it just becomes a big cycle. You do it to the next person, and the next person, and the next person.”
Cultural Biases Make Women Effective Traffickers
Because Hollywood and the western media almost always portray traffickers as men, many people do not realize that women can also be traffickers. We are taught that women are “safe” and that we can feel comfortable relying on them for help in vulnerable situations. This means that women who are traffickers or recruiters can take advantage of unsuspecting individuals and more easily gain their trust, giving them an “edge” over male traffickers. The Albany Government Law Review (AGLR) notes, “In contemporary Americanized western cultures, such as that in the United States, violence and aggression are habitually interpreted or characterized as masculine features. Observers claim that when violence is perpetrated by a woman, her behavior is frequently not interpreted as the action of an autonomous, psychologically sound adult, but rather as a product of mental or emotional illness, due to gender-based oppression or exploitation, attendant to a male culprit.”
Ultimately, this means that if a woman is a trafficker, western cultures will often assume that she is being manipulated or coerced by a male trafficker, rather than believe she willingly chose to exploit others.
Such fundamentally flawed cultural expectations also make it easier for female traffickers or recruiters to pull people into exploitive situations. According to a report by the Regional Academy on the United Nations (RAUN), “regarding sexual trafficking women are usually known as the victims and not the offenders. These perceptions of women created by society also play a role in the victim’s trust towards female offenders. Therefore, women are more likely to trust and be seduced by female than male recruiters.”
Tillman’s own experiences attest to the effectiveness of female recruiters. After a period of time in jail, Tillman was drawn back into trafficking by a young woman. Tillman explained, “When I got out of jail, there was a young Caucasian girl about my age, about 15 or 16, that came up and she started talking to me. And she made me feel at ease and said that she would help me, but she actually was a recruiter for another pimp. They either use other girls in the life to recruit vulnerable children that they see on the street, and it can be a boy or a girl, but they probably use the female that’s usually someone that’s under their control as well . . . Females feel more comfortable talking to another female . . . so they [traffickers] know that it’s more effective to use a female because you’re more trusting of a female than a man or a young guy.”
However, unlike America and other western societies, not all countries have cultural assumptions that women are trustworthy, inherently gentle, and nurturing. Research in the AGLR article points out that several countries, including Israel, Venezuela, and Benin, consider women highly capable of violence, making it clear that deeply ingrained social constructs, rather than biological sex, shape how women are expected to behave in trafficking situations. The RAUN report notes that in Nigeria, for example, the typical cultural expectation is that women can, and frequently do, spearhead trafficking operations. Likewise, according to the RAUN report, in Thailand, women (typically referred to as ‘mama-sans’) are integral to trafficking operations: “In order to coerce their victims the mama-sans use violence and threats. The Thai female offenders also manage the girls and keep them under surveillance.”
No Easy Answers
Female-perpetrated trafficking is a challenging issue, made more so by the lack of research exploring the nuances of the problem. Just as nearly anyone can be a victim of trafficking, almost anyone can become a trafficker. Assessments of whether someone is a victim or victimizer should not be exclusively based on biological sex or gender, particularly as men and boys can be victims of human trafficking. Rather, individuals from a trafficking environment should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, with qualified professionals conducting evaluations to detect traumatic experiences and victimization. Quiroz, who is part of the Sonoma County Human Trafficking Task Force, affirmed this, explaining that law enforcement should not take female traffickers at face value, but instead work to understand the circumstances that led to their crimes and provide resources to support them. Ideally, this would prevent the unjust criminalization of victims and help identify mitigating factors for exploited people who went on the exploit others. Like men, women can be voluntary, violent traffickers, but environmental factors like abuse, poverty, and social conditions can predispose anyone, both men and women, to continue the destructive trafficking cycle.
Therese Majeski is a recent graduate from Cornell College, Iowa with a B.A. in psychology and a minor in applied statistics. She is an aspiring forensic linguist taking a gap year before grad school to write and volunteer. Whether through academics or journalism, Therese is passionate about using the power of language to achieve a more just world and effect positive change.
Graphics by Anna Ionescu
