Lauren McCarthy has written an incisive analysis of how Russian law enforcement has pursued the trafficking in persons in the decade since Russia passed anti-trafficking reforms. She finds that law enforcement has begun to take the problem more seriously, prosecuting hundreds of cases using the new laws and many others using laws already on the books, such as laws governing recruitment into and organizing prostitution. Police, investigators, prosecutors, and judges are most responsive to the trafficking of children, labor trafficking when there are physical restraints used, and sex trafficking when the women most closely resemble innocent young girls kidnapped and physically coerced into prostitution. However, many other incidents of trafficking are slipping through the cracks.
Through a thorough analysis of more than five thousand news articles and more than a hundred interviews with personnel and nongovernmental organization activists, the study documents how law enforcement response is shaped by formal and informal rules at every stage of the process. Trafficking Justice shows that though Russian law enforcement remains plagued by corruption, officials tend to act rationally. However, that makes it particularly difficult to address trafficking. As McCarthy puts it, “Russian law enforcement officials are not simply lawless, corrupt, willy-nilly enforcers of the law or interested only in collecting bribes. They are quite attuned to the technicalities of the law and concerned with following it closely, lest they feel the wrath of their superiors for poor work or not having a large enough completed caseload to qualify for promotion” (p. 113). The author’s methods give us strong, if incomplete, evidence of this phenomenon. Beginning with what we know about the problem of trafficking, an overview of the reforms passed in 2003 and 2008, and the law enforcement institutional context, the book is subsequently organized by three stages: the identification of cases, the investigation of these cases, and the indictment, trial, and sentencing of perpetrators.
Most helpful for political scientists of Russia is the analysis of what McCarthy calls the “institutional machinery” of law enforcement. Despite a series of reforms since the collapse of the Soviet Union, law enforcement operates under an onerous statistical performance assessment that makes officials extremely risk averse and continues to result in little proactive policing. Because of this “stick system” (palochnaia sistema), police are reluctant to open cases if they fear that they cannot clear the case within the time frame specified by the criminal code, a problem especially obstructive given the complexities of most trafficking cases. Exacerbating this formal policy is the extreme hierarchy in Russian law enforcement, which mixes corruption and militarism, and normalizes the prioritization of statistics (even their falsification) over reducing crime and helping people. Complicating these dynamics are the many overlapping agencies, segregated regionally, involved in investigating human trafficking. These include the police, police investigators, investigators affiliated with Russia’s peculiar procuracy (the general prosecutor’s office, which has had tremendous power), the FSB (the new KGB), and the Federal Migration Service. By mapping this institutional context, McCarthy shows how even the most reluctant and informally constituted street-level bureaucrats navigate the formal rules.
For those most interested in the problem of human trafficking, there are harrowing stories throughout the book of physical and psychological abuse, torture, and human slavery, including individuals being chained, barely fed, and raped. These narratives shed light on the problem of the trafficking in persons, which remains mystifying even for those of us who study the problem. Labor trafficking is particularly hidden, though probably common, as between a half to two-thirds of Russia’s economy is informal (p. 33). Child trafficking and sex trafficking are more open (clients must be found for the scheme to work) but our understanding is often shaped by the sensationalist stories that capture our attention.
McCarthy’s findings are both different from and similar to another recent book on trafficking in Russia, Jennifer Suchland’s Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (2015). In contrast to McCarthy, who focuses on the criminal justice system, Suchland criticizes the global activism against human trafficking that casts trafficking as a violation of human rights, with the focus on reforming the criminal justice system more than anything else, which “has obscured the economies of violence that sustain it” (Economies of Violence, p. 1). While McCarthy’s book is empirical, Suchland’s book is theoretical, calling for “trafficking [to] be situated within the myriad circuits of informal, flexibilized, and nonstandard labor as well as the legacies of imperialist state formations” (Economies, p. 13). Despite their opposite approaches, McCarthy, too, finds that human trafficking is a problem primarily of populations marginalized by poverty, xenophobia, and substance abuse, as well as the broken orphanage system and failure of officials to take violence in the family seriously. McCarthy finds that lacking state-funded victim services not only hurt victims but also hinder law enforcement, which needs victim testimony.
Within policy studies, the study of policy implementation is the most underdeveloped, as it requires on-the-ground observation across multiple jurisdictions over significant periods of time. In one of the most difficult of contexts—Russian law enforcement, which is constituted by large, secretive, byzantine, interrelated bureaucracies—McCarthy demonstrates effective methods of data collection and analysis.
Of course, I wish there was even more evidence about trafficking and the Russian state’s response. The study relies mostly on news stories—the publication of which is shaped by societal perceptions of human trafficking and law enforcement responsiveness—but I do not think that we have the right to expect researchers to put themselves in the kind of danger required to be more thorough. More reasonably, I expected more analysis of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality—not just in the victims and the perpetrators but also in the institutional machinery, which, I suspect, is shaped by heteronormative, Russian-centric masculinity, as the rest of the system is (see Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics & Putin, 2015, and Janet Elise Johnson, The Gender of Informal Politics: Russia, Iceland and Twenty-First Century Male Dominance, forthcoming). I also would have appreciated the fleshing out of the implications for the study of Russia’s regime type, policy studies, and the study of trafficking, which are understated here.
This is an essential book for all political scientists interested in studying Russia and other post-Soviet states, and chapters could be excerpted for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian or postcommunist politics (especially the chapters on the problem of trafficking and law enforcement’s institutional machinery). Perhaps most refreshing is the fact that Vladimir Putin, who looms so large in the coverage of Russia, plays such a small role in this book. What McCarthy and others who study what actually happens in Russia know is that Putin “doth protest too much” that he controls Russia. Instead, street-level bureaucrats—in overlapping, sometimes coercive, but often subversive systems—are the meat and potatoes of Russia’s governance.
