Child Trafficking: Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns

Abstract

Commenting on whether there was evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, famously told the press: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ These ‘unknown unknowns’ were the threats from Saddam that could not even be imagined or suspected (Žižek 2004).