Our member, Dr Elizabeth Faulkner (Keele University, UK), talks about her new book, The Trafficking of Children: International Law, Modern Slavery, and the Anti-trafficking Machine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Child trafficking holds a unique position as an issue of significant contemporary relevance, occupying a principal place in debates about human rights today. The field emerged from concerns of child labour and collided with the anti-sex trafficking field in the 1990s. This created a toxic cocktail of concern and hysteria about the phenomena and how this evil practice should be eradicated to save the world’s children. This notion of saving children is problematic, as the law and policy frameworks implemented create unequal, unjust, and discriminatory access to those they purport to protect.
The interchangeable terms human trafficking and “modern slavery” evoke emotive responses and proclamations about the abolition of contemporary ills, viewed as the ultimate aberration when a child is involved. The classification of children under legal frameworks marks them as different, as “other”. For those who do not sit neatly within the category of child victim, they are often demonised and excluded from the parameters of “protection” afforded by the law. This demarcation between deserving and undeserving children within the broader context of child exploitation is fascinating, and not isolated to one legal jurisdiction alone. This is where my interest in language creeps to the fore, and how the law both responds and treats children in differing ways.
The book seeks to centralise child trafficking within the theoretical framework that the author identifies as the “anti-trafficking machine”, as a lens to examine and illuminate how child trafficking law and policy is rooted in a set of racialised, gendered, and imperial considerations.
The idea of a monograph emerged from something my first doctoral supervisor mentioned in passing, and it had a lasting impact upon me. I did not submit the book by the original date and something we need to acknowledge more in academia is rejection, failure and delays that frequently outnumber the successes. It’s a project that I have spent years upon, albeit interrupted by three periods of maternity leave (two during the doctoral research which led to completion on a part-time) and the third during the 2021/2022 academic year. The impact of pregnancy loss at the end of 2019 coupled with Covid-19 and childcare again caused delays with the production of the monograph and I was tempted to dissect the project into journal articles as the size of producing a book seemed unmanageable.
I am glad I persevered and that I had the opportunity to test and fine-tune the logic and my reasoning through my undergraduate third year elective module ‘Child Law’ in the Autumn term at Keele. The cohort of 2022/23 were superb, and I am indebted to their enthusiasm and active participation, which enabled me to finally let go of the draft. It’s a surreal experience, and I found letting go much more difficult than anticipated as I felt I had much more to say and that it could’ve been more polished – I am aware in the field of academia and particularly as an ECR the acute pressures for perfection. It’s not perfect, but it’s finally published.
Child trafficking conjures images of poor, innocent children, trapped, brutalised by evil traffickers, and forced to exist as the slaves of the twenty-first century. The emergence of child trafficking as an issue of contemporary concern was highlighted as a shift from concerns focusing upon child sexual exploitation to child trafficking (Howard, 2017). The phenomenon of child trafficking holds a unique position as an issue of significant contemporary relevance, occupying a principal place in debates about human rights today. Campaigns to eradicate child trafficking and or slavery receive a plethora of support from public figures at all levels of society from celebrities to politicians and religious leaders.
What makes child trafficking distinctive within the broader pantheon of human trafficking? This links to the fear and moral outrage that is attached to the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Proponents of children’s rights[1] and radical feminists (Barry, 1981, 1994) conceptualise prostitution as sexual exploitation and abuse, reflecting unequal power relations between adults and children, and men and women (Charnley & Nkhoma, 2020). This understanding underpins interventions to ‘rescue’ children from prostitution, with little appreciation of the complex realities of children’s lives and circumstances (Melrose, 2010) Undoubtedly the abuse of a child is abhorrent and this text does not seek to detract from that but seeks to question why children and in turn childhood are constructed within a protectionist discourse, that seeks to protect children with one hand but often with the other conflicts with the rights of those it purports to protect and their voices or agency.
The trafficking of children re-emerged to social prominence in the mid–late 1990s (Howard, 2017, 3) and remains an issue of tantamount importance, but what constitutes and does not constitute child trafficking remains a contested space. With the onslaught of the global pandemic of COVID-19 in 2020 identified by the former Special Rapporteur Maria Grazia Giammatinaro as ‘exacerbating the vulnerabilities of children to sexual exploitation’.[2] With ongoing linkages between trafficking and the sexual exploitation effectively capturing popular imagination, child trafficking appears to be an issue that is destined to remain. Evidenced by the increasing number of non-governmental and international non-governmental organisations established, or through the shift in focus of towards eradicating the contemporary evil of social ill of child trafficking and enslavement, to the continued presence of stories of trafficking in the media. One illustrative example can be seen through Save the Children, which proclaims that ‘child trafficking is a crime and represents the tragic end to childhood’.[3] A further one through the revelations in July 2022 that a national treasure of the UK and winner of four Olympic Gold medals for long distance running Sir Mo Farah was trafficked at the age of nine into the UK for domestic servitude.[4]
You may wonder why I have referenced Mo Farah and his recent (at the time of writing) disclosure? The context here is important, with successive political support being built upon fears of immigration and the establishment and maintenance of the ‘hostile environment’ within the UK. This links to research that has illustrated the silences surrounding the issues. For example, a 2009 report commissioned by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children highlighted that identifying trafficking can be hindered by silence and that disclosure of abuse is gradual and incremental. The specific story of Mo Farah in the UK raises some difficult questions, such as who deserves to be viewed as a victim and how they are subsequently treated by the legal system (England and Wales in this instance). The difference between the outcomes for Mo Farah and children that have been trafficked into the UK for exploitation such as cannabis cultivation can be illustrated by the recent case V.C.L and A.N. v United Kingdom (2021) European Court of Human Rights. The potential threat of the legal ramifications of Farah’s admission provides an insight into why the topic of child trafficking continues to capture contemporary imagination. The Home Office within the UK has subsequently confirmed that no action will be taken against Farah, but what if he was not an Olympic hero?
[1] See further the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989; UN Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child; ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) International, Global Monitoring Report on the Status of Action Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: Thailand (Bangkok: ECPAT International; Melrose, M. & Pearce, J., Critical perspectives on child sexual exploitation and related trafficking. [Online] (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Trafficking/COVID-19-Impact-trafficking.pdf. Accessed September 2020.
[3] The Fight Against Child Trafficking | Save the Children. Accessed October 2022
[4] See further ‘My name is not Mo Farah, it’s Hussein’: British Olympic hero reveals he was trafficked into UK | Daily Mail Online (2022). Accessed September 2022; The Real Mo Farah review–a beautiful, heart-breaking story that exposes cruel Tory policy | Mo Farah | The Guardian (2022). Accessed September 2022.