What do we mean by “Criminalised Economies”?

Criminalised labour can include scamming, fraud, commercial sex (in countries where it is criminalised), human smuggling, and drug farming, manufacturing, or trading. While some people engage in these trades legally, others are there through force, fraud, or coercion, or out of lack of economic opportunity. Not all crimes are violent, and not all violence is encoded in criminal law. Violence is not the same as crime, and vice versa. Because of the history of using “illicit” and “criminal” in partnership with racist framings of crime, saying “criminalised economies” is a way of acknowledging that many ways of making income are encoded in our laws as crimes without making an inherent judgment about the individuals engaged in these economies. Using “criminalised” acknowledges that crime =/= violence.

Recommended citation: “Criminalised Economies.” Movement Glossary. Collective Threads Initiative, 2026. https://www.collectivethreads.org (date accessed).