By Kevin Hyland & Robert D. Marin
In 2016, then-Prime Minister Theresa May marked the first anniversary of the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act with a commentary touting how our research in the UK and Romania had helped uncover “criminal gangs creating twinned towns of modern slavery.” What made our approach unique was the pairing of specific source and destination localities as a single unit of analysis. Despite this prominent endorsement, our twinning methodology for understanding modern slavery was not further developed as a policy tool. A decade later, its absence undermines the global fight against modern slavery and human trafficking, because linking places of origin and destination is a better guide for official intervention than a purely national approach.
Trafficking is mostly framed as a macro phenomenon driven by asymmetries between rich and poor regions. While this framing identifies important structural causes, it does not fully explain how these networks operate. Instead of following Romanian population patterns in the UK, as one might expect, our research shows a more specific geography of recruitment and exploitation in cases of trafficking and modern slavery.
As Tim Hall of the University of Winchester has argued, macro-level explanations obscure the localized aspects of organized crime. Criminals base their business models on the opportunities available where they live. Moreover, localities are not bounded containers, but nodes that are formed through wider social relations. A Romanian county, for example, becomes a trafficking hub because recruitment networks, migration cycles, and destination-side demand sustain links to particular places that enable and encourage the growth of criminal networks.
This illustrates the late sociologist Ronald Robertson’s concept of glocalization: globalization operates through localized differentiation, reinforcing rather than dissolving the individuality of local settings. Criminal networks exploit local settings by embedding themselves in the specific source and destination localities of cross-border slavery and trafficking corridors, connecting the two. These recurrent pairs are produced by migration histories and demand for labour and sexual exploitation. The structural inequalities between source and destination localities condition these corridors, which can be partly revealed by governmental efforts to disrupt or contain them. Thus, twinning differs from “transnational trafficking” or “cross-border organized crime”—terms that describe a category of criminal activity rather than the relational structure that sustains it.
We observed such twinning between 2011 and 2023, when overseeing Romanian National Police secondments to UK police forces. Working together, the officers documented 55 Romanian-UK trafficking cases in which both the source county and the destination region were identified. Of the resulting 88 county-to-region pairings, 30 route to Greater London, while on the Romanian side, Dâmbovița appears in 12 cases, Ilfov in 11, Buzău in 10, and Brăila in nine. This is, of course, hardly an exhaustive mapping of the criminal geography in both countries.
At the same time, several Romanian counties link to different UK regions simultaneously. This reflects the mobility of trafficking networks themselves and supports previous findings that Romanian origin-destination profiles are not always geographically contiguous.
Once such criminal twinning is identified, how should policymakers respond? Action at only one end will always be incomplete. A bilateral and multi-domain policy, one that ties prevention in the source jurisdiction with demand reduction in the destination jurisdiction, is essential.
When May referred to the “twinned towns of modern slavery” in 2016, she named a pattern that researchers had started to document. Since then, the evidence has further supported this interpretation, suggesting that the concept offers a stronger basis for organizing policy responses to modern slavery and human trafficking than national aggregates or isolated interventions do.
Unfortunately, the many official and civil-society actors trying to address these patterns often do not see themselves as part of the same operation. Our twinning framework provides a shared roadmap that promises to strengthen their efforts, without requiring the creation of new agencies, powers, or agreements. It directs resources to the specific pairs of places where trafficking concentrates, so that prevention campaigns can target the source localities feeding a particular destination. Local authorities and police forces can then cooperate as pairs, diaspora organizations can act as protection intermediaries within their own corridor, and results can be measured corridor by corridor rather than lost in national totals.
Kevin Hyland is the UK’s first Anti-Slavery Commissioner and CEO of Praeveni Global, a nonprofit focused on preventing modern slavery and human trafficking. Robert D. Marin, a former secretary of state in the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs, is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham—the Rights Lab.