The Belief in a Just Finland as a Form of Cultural Violence: The Effects of Victim Blaming on the Identification and Assistance of Victims of Human Trafficking

Abstract

The identification of human trafficking is often referred to as the greatest challenge in anti-trafficking action. Both the offenders and the victims may seek to avoid the attention of public authorities, which is why human trafficking is described as an invisible crime. However, the invisibility may be sustained not only by the actors involved, but also by our own tendency to deny, belittle, or justify an injustice by blaming the victim. The research aim of this study is to explore how blaming human trafficking victims functions as a form of cultural violence in Finland: what kinds of victim-blaming attitudes there are, and how they affect the identification and assistance of trafficking victims. Victim blaming is approached with the theoretical framework of the just-world hypothesis, according to which people may react to victims with denial, derogation, and blame in order to restore their fundamental belief in a just and orderly world. The qualitative content analysis is based on two types of data fulfilling each other: a face-to-face qualitative survey among 61 participants and expert interviews of four employees of the Finnish National Assistance System for Victims of Human Trafficking. The qualitative survey represents the lay people’s beliefs related to human trafficking, while the expert interviews elaborate the effects of Belief in a Just World (BJW)-related beliefs on the identification and assistance of trafficking victims.

The findings indicate that there are a variety of victim-blaming attitudes related to the just-world hypothesis, which may affect the identification and assistance of victims depending on their background and form of exploitation. The attitudes were often connected to the general lack of awareness and misleading depictions of human trafficking, but connections to personality, life experience, empathic concern, and working circumstances were also indicated. By using Lerner’s just-world metaphor of “Our just world” and the “world of victims”, I interpreted the various beliefs to be parts of the same entity of the “Belief in a Just Finland”. In this belief system, there is no human trafficking in Finland and it does not concern Finnish nationals, men are not vulnerable, women can stay safe by being careful, yet strong and independent, and individuals are rational and in control of their fate by demonstrating adequate character or behaviour. The “world of victims” portrays the realities and people that are excluded from the perceived “Our just world”: human trafficking as an extreme form of violence and slavery, the feelings of inability, guilt, and helplessness, “innocent victims” and derogated sex workers, foreigners and drug users. These beliefs contribute to the invisibility of victims from various backgrounds, they increase the likelihood of victims to be encountered with disbelief, derogation, and blame, and the subsequent threshold to seek help, they may contribute to reluctance of both laymen and public authorities to intervene on behalf of the victims, and they may affect the processes of criminal procedures and residence permit policies. However, alternative approaches to these beliefs were detected from the data: awareness, empathy, and positive examples were found as avenues towards cultural peace.