JCU's Department of Political Science and International Affairs is currently hosting Visiting Research Scholar Raquel López Garrido, who is conducting research in the field of human rights and trafficking under the supervision of Department Chair and Professor Silvia Scarpa.
López Garrido conducts PhD research and teaches at Universidad Pontificia Comillas of Madrid in Spain. She has a background in International Relations and Human Rights and is researching the issue of human trafficking for exploitation in criminal activities, focusing on victims of drug trafficking in Spain.
She challenges the traditional focus in this field that mostly places attention towards sexual and labor exploitation, by arguing that victims’ forced involvement in criminal activities is often overlooked by national authorities, especially for crimes such as drug trafficking. Often, victims of drug trafficking are not only drug users, but also women who are threatened, blackmailed or coerced to carry these substances.
López Garrido conducted qualitative research in some Spanish prisons and interviewed women sentenced for drug trafficking. She analyzed the stories of several convicted prisoners in light of the definition of human trafficking specified in the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, in Spanish legislation, and by considering the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s human trafficking indicators. She concluded that many of them should have been identified as trafficking victims.
López Garrido shared the results of her PhD research work with MA and undergraduate students of Professor Scarpa’s courses Human Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery in International Law and Politics and Human Trafficking and Contemporary Slavery.
Students were asked to analyze some of the testimonies of convicted prisoners to acknowledge the differences between human trafficking, criminal exploitation and drug trafficking. These lectures helped bring light to the invisible issue of the misidentification of victims of human trafficking, especially those that have been forced to commit crimes such as drug trafficking.
