A New Study Exposes How Albania Fails Its LGBTQ+ Community — Pushing Them Toward Trafficking

We’ve lived in Tirana long enough to know that Albania’s relationship with its LGBTQ+ community is complicated. On paper, the country has some of the region’s stronger anti-discrimination protections. In practice, the gap between law and lived experience is vast — and a new study published this month in the Journal of Human Trafficking lays bare just how dangerous that gap can be.

The research, led by Blerta Bodinaku and Anila Sulstarova at the University of Tirana alongside colleagues Skerdi Zahaj, Greta Hysi, and Gerda Sula, is the first qualitative, multi-source study to examine how LGBTQ+ vulnerability to trafficking for sexual exploitation is produced and sustained specifically in Albania. Published on April 6, it draws on in-depth interviews with victims, focus groups with community members, conversations with frontline professionals, and analysis of anonymized case files.

What the study found

The findings are difficult to read, but they matter. The researchers describe a cascading process: family rejection leads to early institutional failure, which leads to legal invisibility, which leads to socioeconomic exclusion — and all of these factors interact over time to normalize exploitation and severely constrain alternatives.

What makes this study particularly valuable is its honesty about ambiguity. The researchers found that within Albania’s informal economies and intimate relationships, the line between agency and coercion often blurs. People don’t always recognize their own exploitation, partly because the system around them has already taught them that their options are limited.

Using reflexive thematic analysis, the team integrated perspectives from survivors, service providers, and institutional documentation. The picture that emerges isn’t one of individual bad actors — it’s one of structural violence, where the state’s failure to fully include LGBTQ+ people in its social fabric creates conditions that traffickers exploit.

Why this matters for the Balkans

Albania isn’t unique in this regard. Across the Western Balkans, LGBTQ+ individuals face similar intersecting pressures: conservative family structures, weak institutional protections, economic precarity, and migration pressures. What happens in Albania is a window into dynamics playing out in Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, and beyond.

We’ve seen this firsthand. In our years living across the Balkans, we’ve met LGBTQ+ people who’ve left their families, their cities, sometimes their countries — not because they wanted to, but because staying meant danger. The infrastructure to catch them when they fall simply isn’t there yet.

The study’s authors are clear about what needs to change: identification frameworks for trafficking victims need to become more inclusive, responses need to be trauma-informed and rights-based, and — most critically — the structural determinants of vulnerability need to be addressed. You can’t solve trafficking with rescue operations alone when the entire system is pushing people toward exploitation.

The EU accession question

This research lands at a particularly important moment. Albania’s EU accession process has been a slow-motion negotiation over values, and LGBTQ+ rights remain one of the benchmarks that Brussels watches closely. The country’s National Action Plan for LGBTI People runs through 2027, but implementation has been uneven.

Studies like this one contribute directly to the evidence base that EU institutions use when evaluating candidate countries. If Albania wants to demonstrate that its anti-discrimination framework isn’t just performative, addressing the structural violence documented in this research would be a meaningful place to start.

The study contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals 5 (gender equality) and 16 (peace, justice, and inclusive societies), and the researchers note that their findings are relevant well beyond Albania’s borders. For anyone working on LGBTQ+ rights in the enlargement countries, this is essential reading.

The full study, “Structural Violence and LGBTQ+ Vulnerability to Trafficking in Persons for Sexual Exploitation in Albania,” is available through the Journal of Human Trafficking via Taylor & Francis.