Psychology of Traffickers: Insights from Romanian Prisons

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 twenty 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. 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