Accessing participants. Documentary analysis

Accessing participants

In the field of human trafficking, there is a myriad of politics around victims that results in many outsider researchers (i. e. university-based researchers who are not directly connected to an NGO) being denied access to victims of trafficking (see Bosworth et al., 2011 regarding access and politics). This is at once understandable and a source of frustration. It impacts research in the area if we cannot have inde- pendent researchers speaking with those who have been identified as victims of trafficking about their experience, but also about their experience of criminal jus- tice and immigration processes and, of course, of the specific processes and provisions offered to them via victim support packages implemented by NGOs.

That said, it is also necessary to ensure that researchers are not constantly knocking on the door asking for those who have been identified as victims to ‘tell us your story’. NGOs are dependent on government and/or private funding. This necessar- ily results in restricting access. We recommend, first, developing a very clear outline of the research and your expertise in this area when you approach NGOs. We also recommend offering to work together: that is, to pursue any opportunity to produce something useful for that agency whilst also undertaking your own work. This might be separate to your research or connected. NGOs have limited resources and the least researchers can do is offer to support those NGOs that enable our research to be undertaken.

That said, some NGOs will say no. When the answer is no, the project needs to be revised. It is possible and important to interview others (or to go beyond inter- views, as we develop in the next section). It is important when writing about your research design and findings that you acknowledge those avenues that were not available to you, in a way that ensures that it is clear you sought to pursue them, but not in a way that is critical of the NGO as such conduct is not useful in the broader pursuit of encouraging high-quality, independent research. Our work always involves practitioners and policy makers, as we are particularly interested in the assumptions that underpin law and policy, the practical realities of the imple- mentation of law and the extent to which the intention of protection measures realizes that intention (see Segrave et al., 2017). That said, in the same way but for different reasons, these state actors and institutions can also say no. There is little that can be done if this happens. We can interview those who have interactions with authorities, those who have witnessed their actions, but the research must shift in focus. Again, it is as important to acknowledge when writing the analysis who said no as it is to identify your participants; this allows the reader to under- stand that some of the limitations of the research, and the final scope of the project, were not of your original design, but in part due to the refusal of engage- ment. A significant challenge across criminological research on issues of victimization and exploitation, that is perhaps a more generalized comment regard- ing interview processes, is that there is an inherent assumption that proximity to victims equals authority in the data produced. We challenge this and we urge stu- dents and researchers in criminology to also challenge this. In the area of human trafficking, this can be refuted in many ways, including the following:

1. Focusing on victims is dependent on victims being identified as such. Absent from this are all the unlawful migrant workers who have been exploited who have not been recognized as victims of human trafficking (see Segrave, 2017; Segrave et al., 2009) – to what extent are their voices and experience counted?

2. Focusing on victim experiences, in an interview setting, is inherently limited by the capacity of this type of research. We can only know their experiences. It tells us about experiences of migration and exploitation, and potentially about the ways authorities and NGOs conduct themselves, but that is its limit.

3. At times, there is an expectation that we should ask victims what should be done. However, victims, even those who have been through the criminal justice system, are not necessarily well placed to know how we can, for example, improve the way in which prosecutions are conducted.

There are specific areas of individual experience that are critical to understanding human trafficking and to critically engaging with responses at every jurisdictional level. However, it is possible to do important and groundbreaking work in this area that does not rely on interview data. We focus on that in the next section.

DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

Human trafficking has captured the imagination of policy makers, news media, fic- tional media creators and the general community in diverse ways. Here we focus on two areas: policy and law, and fictional media. Within each, we provide an overview of one or two examples of research, and highlight the methodological and/or ana- lytical approach adopted.