Problem Statement:
Human trafficking in Sweden typically takes the form of forced labor, coerced crime or sex trafficking, with the latter being most common (especially with women and children). Victims of Swedish trafficking are typically migrants and are targeted for their undocumented status, inability to return home, and lack of strong support networks or knowledge of rights and resources in Sweden. This issue became endemic to Europe as a whole during the 2015 Refugee Crisis, in which 70 percent of refugees in Europe had been exposed to some form of trafficking.
Existing Initiatives and Limitations:
In response to the burgeoning sex trafficking sector, the Riksdagen (Swedish parliament) started enacting stronger anti-trafficking legislation at the close of the 20th century. In recent years there have been some modifications to the existing legislation. However, despite increasingly robust anti-trafficking legislation, Sweden has seen mixed results in curbing its trafficking problem. The increasing elusiveness of trafficking cases in Sweden is, in part, due to factors outside of law enforcement’s control. The internet has been a key resource for traffickers to operate in a more subtle and sophisticated manner, and the trafficking of minors is especially notoriously difficult to map. However, much of the failure to resolve trafficking cases still lies squarely at the feet of Swedish authorities.
Impact of the Policies and Initiatives:
Policies such as the practice of placing unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors in either network homes or the residences of an extended family already in Sweden have exposed many of these children to unsupervised, potentially risky environments that have not been properly evaluated by Swedish officials. Additionally, the standard Swedish practice of pushing asylum-seekers to the fringes of Swedish society after a short honeymoon period often culminates in migrants being stuck in declining, isolated areas with little economic opportunity, redoubling their poverty and vulnerability to trafficking. This out-of-sight, out-of-mind creation of “parallel societies” cut off from the mainstream public all but guarantees the inability to collect data on and properly counter the trafficking of migrants. The cracks in Sweden’s asylum system and anti-trafficking infrastructure were already ripe for abuse when 165,000 asylum-seekers arrived at Sweden’s doorstep in 2015.
