The moral panic over child trafficking detracts from important questions about children and childhood, the state, and immigration. We worry about child trafficking, but what exactly is it?
All of these numbers might suggest that the phenomenon is indeed on the ascendency, although closer attention to the data reveals that those identified were potential victims rather than actual victims of child / human trafficking. This, alone, should give major pause for thought.
A challenge faced by those seeking to count victims of trafficking lies in the rather woolly definition and idea of trafficking itself. The supposed clarity offered by the NSPCC definition—itself taken from the Palermo Protocol, 2000—often falls apart in practice because it is often very difficult to identify what should be included (and excluded) when we talk about child trafficking. According to the definition, movement or mobility is necessary for trafficking to have taken place (child A is moved from location X to location Y). But is movement of children necessarily harmful? Clearly not, as demonstrated by the ‘mom’s taxi’ phenomenon that is experienced by middle-class children across the world as they are ferried from one supposedly socially-enhancing activity to another. So it’s not actually the movement of children across spaces that’s concerning. Rather, it’s what happens to children during and after the journey.
What if a child’s life is awful before the journey? For example, when a child from a war-torn country moves or is sent by parents to be brought up by friends or relatives elsewhere. Does this constitute child trafficking? In practice, different agencies (governmental and NGO) have defined child trafficking so loosely that almost any form of movement involving a child can end up being described as ‘child trafficking’. Some reports include adoption, fostering, and children going missing from care within their working definitions of trafficking; others include children placed illegally in children’s homes. This lack of consistency means that it is often impossible to know not only what the problem is, but also if it is getting worse, better, or remaining roughly consistent over time.
The second definitional problem relates to the idea of the child itself. What do we include (and exclude) in our definition of a child? Are we talking about children up to the age of 16 (the school-leaving age and legal age of sexual consent in the UK), or 18, or perhaps even 21 years, as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child suggests? Not only does the lack of agreement make giving accurate numbers on child trafficking (if we can neatly pin this down) across the world an exercise in futility, but also the issue throws into sharp relief contested ideas about young people and sex. When is a young person able to understand and consent to their movement regardless of what the outcome of is movement is, and when do they need protection from it? Different perspectives across countries and over time suggest, again, that there is no way of knowing whether this is a problem that is worsening, improving, or staying that same.
What else is going on here?
It is right that children and young people (wherever they come from) should be protected from harm, but the current scare about child trafficking might best be seen as an example of moral panic. Moral panics exaggerate issues of genuine concern. In doing so, they draw attention away from other important social issues and contribute to wider societal fear. They are not, as Jock Young argued in 2009, one-off disturbances. They reappear in connection with shifts in the wider social order. As my colleagues and I have written elsewhere, the idea of child trafficking is an old concern that first appeared in the late nineteenth century, another time of widespread social anxiety. At that time, concern about the ‘white slave trade’ focused on the (mistaken) idea that young women were being seduced in large numbers and transported to brothels in Europe.
The re-appearance of child trafficking as a social issue today connects with wider concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, children and childhood, as well as the police and social services. It speaks to the language of moral outrage: “how could we let this happen?” It speaks to a feeling of loss; to the notion that childhood has been somehow ‘lost’ or ‘stolen’, and is ‘in crisis’. And it speaks to a widespread sense that the world is increasingly out of control; that ‘something must be done’. In particular, it helps to fuel further anxiety about a supposed widespread practice of ‘modern slavery’; in this case the enslavement of children torn away from the protection of their family, with no regard for the circumstances from which the child has moved or is being moved.
The outcome of this moral panic is that our sights are taken away from more pressing concerns faced by children deemed to have been trafficked. It is far easier to label a child as a victim of trafficking than to argue that he or she is a victim of wider socio-political and economic harms, and that these need to be addressed. Thus we condone highly illiberal and repressive immigration policies that scapegoat and stigmatise both adults and children in the name of protecting children from being trafficked across borders. We also contribute to the increasing surveillance of children and young people, whose lives are evermore regulated and managed in the name of child ‘protection’. Rather than panicking about child trafficking, I suggest that the interests of children and young people would be better served by more compassionate welfare and immigration policies that give support to their families, and by the provision of mainstream youth services that allow them to enjoy their childhoods without constant scrutiny and supervision.
An earlier version of this was published in 2008. SOURCE
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My definition of trafficking is closed adoption and its victim, the adoptee, loses their identity, family and name. For that reason we need to Abolish Adoption NOW.
The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time https://t.co/FhBV0lphuC via @sharethis
— http:LaraTraceHentz (@Trace15) October 20, 2015
Lara Trace Hentz 