Child Trafficking and Slavery

“Child trafficking” began its career as a core international child protection issue in the late 1990s. It emerged from the union of the anti–child labor and anti–sex trafficking movements, which both underwent a resurgence at that time and paralleled a rise in focus on the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Since around 2005, trafficking has been joined by “child slavery,” which contemporary abolitionists argue is a subset of the “modern-day slavery” that they claim blights the global economy. Child trafficking and child slavery have thus become twin issues, enshrined in—and targeted for eradication by—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Conceptually, each issue is understood and constructed within mainstream media and political discourse as a matter of innocents being kidnapped and enslaved by criminal exploiters or sold by their poverty-stricken/“culturally backward” parents. The conventional policy approaches with which this discourse is associated thus tend toward the draconian, replicating the aggressive yet depoliticizing efforts of those who wish to outlaw child labor and (adult or child) prostitution. Scholars and critical practitioners from all continents have pushed back, arguing that discourse is as problematic and reductive as policy is misguided and ineffective. Criticism has targeted the unsophisticated, at times racist nature of many mainstream representations, as well as the damaging, unintended consequences of top-down policy and project interventions. Many have focused on documenting children’s agency amidst their structural constraints, including the consent that they offer for their work, even where that work is labeled as trafficking or slavery. Others have sought to situate this work within its sociocultural contexts. A small handful of scholars have gone inside the discursive and policy regime in order to understand and map how policymakers think and act around these issues. Considerable differences exist between researchers who have conducted empirical research with children labeled as slaves or victims of trafficking and those who examine these issues from a more bird’s-eye perspective. Naturally, there is great overlap between those who examine related issues—such as child labor, child sexual exploitation, modern slavery, or adult sex trafficking. Nevertheless, given the policy, institutional, and discursive overlaps between child trafficking and slavery and child labor, many of the texts cited will be drawn from literature that straddles both topics.