What does COVID-19 mean for illegal activities? Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses this on Order From Chaos, and finds it depends on the category:
As street life has decreased in Europe, North America, and much of South America, predatory street crime appears to have decreased considerably. There are simply no people on the streets to mug. And with people at home, burglaries and home invasions have become more difficult. …
With more people in the West and Asia at home and bored and access to street prostitution severely curtailed, there is also a chance that online prostitution sites that feature trafficked and enslaved women (as opposed to those who give informed consent to sex work) may see a rise in online trafficking, perhaps stimulating efforts to entrap more women. More time online inevitably means more potential exposure to recruitment by nefarious entities, such as jihadi groups or doomsday cults, portraying COVID-19 as a portend of a forthcoming apocalypse and a justification to purify the land through violence, crime, and fraud.
Understandable, although it didn’t occur to me that enslavement could go up because bored Internet users lacked access to significant others or prostitutes. But then Felbab-Brown surprised me, not so much for suggesting a rise in another class of crime, but recognizing it’s morally, if not legally, a crime:
In 2019, China muscled the World Health Organization (WHO) to include a chapter on traditional Chinese medicine in WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, a highly influential compendium of medical conditions for diagnosis and treatment, influencing also what illnesses and procedures insurance companies pay for. As memories of COVID-19 wane like they did with SARS, and when an effective COVID treatment become available, the powerful traditional Chinese medicine industry will again pressure China and East Asian governments to promote their unproven and often nefarious wares. Before that, some of those desperately ill with COVID-19 and unable to obtain proper medical treatment will be seeking to buy traditional Chinese medicine. Already, to treat COVID-19, the government of China is promoting the use of bear bile, a potion barbarically collected from caged bears or poached ones without a shred of evidence of its curative effects.
It’s the unethical preying on the weak, sad to say, and has happened from time immemorial. Remember that next time you want to tell a friend how ground up rhino horn cured your rheumatiz (it didn’t, as you find out the next week), or how acupuncture is a miracle cure.
But Felbab-Brown’s conclusion, even if she doesn’t use the actual word, is all about evolution in action[1]:
In other illegal economies, such as the illegal drug trade, the COVID-19 disruptions will be even more ephemeral. After temporarily wreaking havoc with some types of crime and enabling others, the coronavirus will leave behind the smartest and most adaptable criminal groups.
This may be turned into a vivid analogy to a drug, ironically played in this scenario by COVID-19, sweeping away the weaker inimical entities, in this case weaker or more brittle criminal gangs, while, as she says, the most adaptable will continue, only stronger and uninhibited by the weaker.
Notice that weaker is a situational adjective. Just as in the medical situation, a gang will have strengths and weaknesses, and it may find itself suppressed by other gangs, or (medically) other cells, that, once they are removed, permit the “stronger” and more difficult to remove entities to flourish and, at least medically speaking, damage or kill the host. This is, at least as I understand it, why cancers that recur after chemo has forced them into remission are no longer sensitive to chemo – the surviving cells that constitute the new cancer are those that are, by definition, not sensitive, and they’re the ones that reproduced after the initial cancer was killed.
For those living in areas that are prone to crime, or near them, this might be something to keep in mind.
1 Another example of Janet Factor’s lovely statement that evolution is substrate-neutral.
