Entre coopération et conflit: La «coopération de confiance» entre la police et les centres de consultation spécialisés dans l’accompagnement des victimes de la traite des êtres humains
Anti-trafficking has become a subject of state action in which humanitarian, social and caring logics, on the one hand, and criminal law logics, on the other hand, are coupled, thereby requiring a reconciliation between their sometimes-conflicting requirements. In the practice of street-level bureaucracy, this is often solved through an institutional separation of responsibilities between law enforcement agencies and social welfare institutions/counseling centers. In our contribution, we use the German case to discuss the conditions of constitutively conflictive cooperation between police units that prosecute trafficking from a criminal law perspective and non-state organized counseling centers for trafficked persons, which follow a more socially oriented, human rights logic and are frequently critical of state-repressive authorities. We focus on the question of how such unlikely cooperation is possible at all. We show that in this context, “trust” becomes an important resource that achieves various things: it enables information exchange but can also replace it, thus productively combining cooperation and distance. Written cooperation agreements help to secure this trust by, among other things, organizing clear responsibilities and stipulating distance and confidentiality obligations in addition to cooperation. In this context, “trust” always remains underdefined as it is understood and used differently by each of the participants.