The damaging effects of inequality : A global quatitative study on the correlation between inequality and human trafficking

Sammanfattning: Abstract Human trafficking is interesting from a developmental point of view. It is one of the worst social phenomenon of our time due to the countless victims that go undetected. This paper examines connections between human trafficking and gender inequality and between human trafficking and inequality overall. The research question is as follows: Is it the level of gender inequality or is it the level of inequality overall that correlates with human trafficking? Looking at previous research stating that human trafficking is related to other social injustices, and applying a vulnerability theory this essay hypothesizes that increased gender inequality and increased inequality overall will increase the level of human trafficking in a country. There is still no known way of estimating how many victims of human trafficking there are. Due to this, rather than looking at the number of people who fall victim to this crime, a scale looking at the perceived level of human trafficking was created by the author. A quantitative method is used to investigate the relationships between human trafficking and gender inequality and between human trafficking and inequality overall. The main finding of this thesis is that there is mainly a connection between human trafficking and gender inequality, but a connection between human trafficking and inequality overall could not be strengthened.