Psychology of Traffickers

Psychology of Traffickers: Insights from Romanian Prisons offers a rare and unsettling look inside the moral and psychological worlds of human traffickers. Based on original qualitative research, the book draws on in-depth interviews with twenty incarcerated traffickers in Romania, a central node in Europe’s trafficking reality, to examine how exploitation is rationalized, normalized, and sustained over time.
Through traffickers’ own narratives, Dr. Bogdan reveals how poverty, migration, gender norms, and geopolitical pressures converge to shape criminal behavior. Rather than portraying traffickers as aberrant monsters or faceless members of criminal networks, the book situates them within the institutional, social, and economic environments that make exploitation possible.
The book makes a distinctive contribution by integrating firsthand offender accounts with criminological theory, while developing original typologies of traffickers grounded in empirical data. In doing so, it challenges simplified victim–perpetrator binaries and offers a more nuanced understanding of trafficking as a systemic phenomenon embedded in inequality, regulation, and moral reasoning.
By bringing together traffickers’ perspectives with the institutional frameworks that govern them, Psychology of Traffickers provides an innovative lens on prevention, accountability, and intervention. It offers policymakers, practitioners, and law enforcement professionals evidence-based insights for designing more effective anti-trafficking strategies, while advancing scholarly debates in forensic psychology, criminology, and criminal justice.