Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour, or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

Abstract

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.

Teenage Labor Migration and Antitrafficking Policy in West Africa

“…They have also been echoed in a few similar studies, conducted in artisanal quarry economies elsewhere in the region (e.g., grätz, 2003, 2009Hilson 2008;Okyere 2012), as well in studies with teenage labor migrants who engage in other types of work and are assumed to be trafficked (e.g., Castle and Diarra 2003;Huijsmans and Baker 2012;Morganti 2011).…”

“Why are we put in prison?”– Independent Guatemalan minor migrants’ experiences of transnational childhoods

“…Often, child migration is solely approached in terms of human trafficking. Huijsmans and Baker, alongside other authors, have criticized this biased tendency as the "worst approach to young migrants" (Huijsmans & Baker, 2012; see also Orgocka & Clark-Kazak, 2012;Uehling, 2008). Nevertheless, in 2009 the reception procedure in Guatemala drew on 4 S. Dietrich recommendations established for the repatriation of children and youth who had become victims of human trafficking 8 , as Patricia Bezares emphasizes (Bezares, 2007).…”

“…Whereas in earlier years young people have seldom been addressed as independent migration actors, today more and more interdisciplinary research focuses on their experiences (see Bhabha, 2014;Boehm, 2008;Ensor & Goździak, 2010;Hashim & Thorsen, 2011;Huijsmans & Baker, 2012;Orgocka & Clark-Kazak, 2012). 3 Much scholarly work on independent child migrants engages in the analysis of the actors' (inter)national human rights as well as in the documentation of the numerous infringements of these rights through state and non-state actors (see Vacchiano & Jiménez, 2014; on Central American/Guatemalan independent child migrants' rights violations see Bhabha, 2008Bhabha, , 2014Escobar Sarti, 2008;Girón Solórzano, 2014 Influenced by a paradigm shift in childhood studies repositioning children and youth as "active agents in the construction of their own lives," independent child migration too is frequently analyzed in terms of agency and vulnerability (Bordonaro, 2014, p. 413;Eßer, 2014;Ensor & Goździak, 2010;Mizen & Ofosu-Kusi, 2013;Oswell, 2013;O'Higgins, 2012;Vacchiano & Jiménez, 2014).…”

Theorising Age and Generation in Development: A Relational Approach

“…Age-normativity underpins policy constructs such as 'youth at risk' that have received considerable critique (for example, Kelly, 2000). It also contributes to prioritising intervening in over understanding young people's lives from their own perspectives, and produces particular framings of social problems that foreclose possible alternative forms of intervention (see, for example, the case of 'child trafficking'; Huijsmans and Baker, 2012). When age-normativity is applied to entire life phases like childhood or youth, 'it makes similarities between older and younger people difficult or impossible to see, and obscures heterogeneity' between people of the same age (Laz, 1998, p. 97).…”