Forced Victims or Willing Migrants? Contesting Assumptions About Child Trafficking

Abstract

Human trafficking continues to capture the imagination of the global public. Gut wrenching narratives about children sold into domestic servitude appear on front pages of major international newspapers, in academic journals, and books sold in university and commercial bookstores. Public discourse emphasizes the particular vulnerability of trafficked children, related to bio-physiological, social, behavioural, and cognitive phases of the maturation process and underscores the necessity to act in the children’s best interest. Trafficked children are nearly always portrayed as hapless victims forced into the trafficking situation and hardly ever as actors with a great deal of volition participating in the decision to migrate. In this chapter, I contest some of the prevailing assumptions about trafficked children and adolescents, especially issues of volition and agency, vulnerability and resiliency, victimhood and survivorship. I contest some of the myths “woven from solid data, conjecture, cultural assumptions, and organizational and political agendas” (Frederick in The wretched of the earth (Richard Philcox, Trans.) (Reprint ed.). New York: Grove Press 2005, 127–128) about the forced nature of the trafficking process and juxtapose them with the experiences as narrated by the survivors of child trafficking. I contrast the image of “the forcibly trafficked child” whose childhood had been lost and needed to be reclaimed with the diversity of experiences and voices that need to be heard in order to facilitate long-term economic and social self-sufficiency of survivors of child trafficking.