Detection Avoidance in UK Border Immigration Crime

Detection Avoidance in UK Border Immigration Crime

Julia de Oliveira
Copyright: © 2024 |Pages: 29
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-9800-2.ch003
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Abstract

As record uncontrolled migration takes place across the world driven by war and other factors, border related immigration crime has soared. In the UK's case, criminal human trafficking gangs and other individuals employ a range of detection avoidance measures to achieve their aim of moving people or themselves across sea, land, and national borders. Such crime is problematic because it is often a mere precursor to other intended crimes; for example, engaging in modern slavery practices or furthering terrorism. A wide range of detection avoidance methods may be used to meet criminal objectives, including disguise of identity as well as identity document or technology abandonment and destruction. The variable nature of these methods has meant the Government's strategy has invoked a plethora of countermeasures in response. Drawing also on approaches in other countries, this chapter analyses the response by public authorities in the UK to this persistent and growing issue.
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Difficulties Of Contextualising And Researching The Issue

The complex nature of the potential crime setting raises several difficulties for researching criminal detection avoidance strategies used by perpetrators in UK border related immigration crime:

Limited Research

Academic literature is limited and there is an absence of both quantitative and qualitative data to outline the problem; although the Migration Observatory has collected some general quantitative data relating to English Channel migration over a five-year period (2022). The Government has also released asylum statistics (UK Government, 2024), yet the nature of asylum processes – with variable stages and appeal processes - means the data is hard to interpret. For example, it is stated that 33% of asylum claims were denied at the first stage, but following appeals processes, one third of those rejections were reversed. What does this really mean, in practical terms? Importantly, anyway, if criminal detection avoidance strategies are successful, the crimes will not be known – or recorded - by authorities, thereby creating an additional research data challenge.

Conceptual Difficulties in Detection Avoidance

Thus, there are clear conceptual difficulties from the outset. Consideration of detection avoidance as a discipline is still in its early stages, and it is likely this is driven by the nature of the topic as falling within preventative crime, as well as its positioning in terms of accepted views of forensics. There are also linguistic challenges, for example in distinguishing detection avoidance from more general criminal evasion behaviours. Detection avoidance measures can also be said to be a feature of most crime anyway: the most widely used detection avoidance measure is likely to be a denial of a crime by an offender. The criminal justice system is, by default, a losing system for the offender’s perspective and there are unlikely to be any benefits to admitting - or openly committing - crime; although it is still worth noting that the plea-bargaining method and sentence reductions may incentivise cooperation in some cases. There remains, then, a need to define the exact parameters of detection avoidance: for example, does it refer only to measures that need to be taken in anticipation of a crime, or does it extend also to unintended post crime coverup issues which are done as mere afterthought? The very nature of criminal legal theory as requiring the necessary mens rea for a crime makes it hard to position the discussion. Some argue detection avoidance should be a crime in itself (Logan, 2023); but there has been limited discussion of how such an exceptionalist view of detection avoidance could be applied to different crimes, let alone to the specific UK border related context.

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