Psychology of Traffickers by Ludmila Bogdan

Psychology of Traffickers by Ludmila Bogdan

Psychology of Traffickers: Insights from Romanian Prisons offers a rare and methodologically rigorous examination of the moral and psychological worlds of individuals convicted of human trafficking. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 incarcerated traffickers in Romania, the book analyzes how exploitation is rationalized, normalized, and sustained over time within conditions of inequality, migration, and institutional constraint.

Rather than portraying traffickers as aberrant or pathological, Dr. Ludmila Bogdan situates their actions within everyday social and moral frameworks: intimate relationships, informal economies, gendered expectations, and bureaucratic systems that enable harm through routine practices and moral distancing. Through traffickers’ own narratives, the book reveals how responsibility is displaced, coercion reframed, and exploitation rendered psychologically livable.

Integrating offender accounts with criminological and forensic psychological theory, the book develops empirically grounded typologies of trafficking involvement and moral coping. In doing so, it challenges simplified victim–perpetrator binaries and advances a structural, narrative-based understanding of trafficking as a social process rather than an exceptional crime.

Designed for forensic psychologists, criminologists, and scholars of violence and inequality, Psychology of Traffickers provides a critical framework for analyzing accountability, risk, and intervention by foregrounding the moral reasoning through which exploitation persists.

Ludmila Bogdan, PhD, is a sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School and recent visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law. Her work lies at the intersection of criminology, sociology, and forensic psychology, with a focus on human trafficking, moral reasoning, and inequality. She has held academic appointments at Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Copenhagen, and has worked with the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations.