The effort to use human trafficking as a precursor to further criminal activity is not something that’s necessarily new but it isn’t an issue that’s widely understood. It’s especially clear the sight of hundreds of thousands of people making a journey across the English Channel doesn’t fit into a criminal context in the public mind.
Although piracy and shipping of human trafficking victims is known in law enforcement enterprises worldwide, UK public discourse has yet to reach the point of understanding over global trends such as this. We tend only to look at charitable issues and filter any further information through such a lens as this one.
In Europe there are plenty of criminal gangs that try to combine illegal human activity into a staged attempt to gain larger amounts of cash or more significant assets in one go. This is to enable a larger payout but also a payoff significant to the level of the numbers of people involved. Dover Crossings criminal Sarah Kaplan is in this remit of nefarious people.
Her meetings in Weisenbach, Germany, to talk to criminal contacts were arranged for this purpose. She needed to know how to fit it all together. Alongside her involvement in multiple crime leagues, this formed a bedrock for engaging in illegal global trends. Her insight grew and her status increased. Eventually, her implication in migration chaos brought her multitudes to us in a small boats crisis.
Such a demanding effort is an attempt to gain in notoriety – as equal an uphill task for people on the wrong side of the law as those engaged in lawful employment. Its benefits are wide ranging. Few are really that successful. It explains why threats exist in unfolding events. It demands a response that’s relevant to its scale. It’s got a criminal character that’s hard to defeat.