To browse Academia. This report addresses this gap by investigating the role of the Internet and digital technologies in the processes of human smuggling and trafficking in the United Kingdom UK.
The research presented here consists in an extensive examination of how the Internet and digital technologies facilitates i. Our research relies primarily on a UK-based virtual ethnography to acquire primary data, conducted between November and February As a research method, virtual ethnography extends the ethnographic field and situated observation from the examination of face-to-face researcher-informant interactions. There are justified concerns but little empirical evidence about the implications of the use of information and communication technologies ICT in the business of human smuggling.
The knowledge base on the use of ICT in human smuggling has rarely gone beyond the rather generic observation that the Internet and mobile technologies are available to and are used by both smugglers and migrants, and there is a concrete knowledge gap regarding the extent and the mode in which the use of ICT is integrated in the process of smuggling.
In this paper, which is part of a wider research effort concerned with the role of the Internet in human smuggling in the European Union, we interrogate the outlook and implications of the use of contemporary mobile technology and of social media in the organisation and conduct of human smuggling to the UK. The two case studies from Italy and the UK presented in this book offer compelling evidence about the nature and the extent of the use of ICT in the business of human smuggling and trafficking.
As such, these findings should be hardly surprising, as, twenty years into the twenty-first century, the use of technologies such as mobile phones and smartphones, the internet and the social web is ubiquitous in the everyday life across the globe.
