From Child Labor “Problem” to Human Trafficking “Crisis”: Child Advocacy and Anti-Trafficking Legislation in Ghana

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between multidimensional child advocacy campaigns and the enactment of Ghana's Human Trafficking Act (2005). I argue that while child advocacy has a rich history, the diffuse labor-oriented advocacy characteristic of the 1990s failed to articulate an achievable goal. Child labor advocacy was impotent because the diverse agencies involved adopted different positions about the permissibility of child labor. By contrast, the anti-trafficking initiatives of the early 2000s focused narrowly on legislative remedy and formulated a discourse of “crisis.” An anti-trafficking coalition built on an international regulation model that emerged from the cocoa industry. As agents of social and political change, domestic, regional, and foreign nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organizations played important roles in shaping debates and framing new law. The Ghanaian law, however, is of limited effectiveness because it ignores autochthonous social practices with historically rich traditions, and it enjoins a narrow, economic model for the proliferation of trafficking.

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“…4 Images of the past are selectively reinterpreted in the present to address a host of political and social issues including group identity formation, nationalism, state legitimacy, social cohesion, conflict resolution, historical trauma, and amelioration. 5 Practices of historical and collective memory are socially useful precisely because they are partial, mutable, flexible, and endlessly adaptable to changing political circumstances and social needs. As such, groups with competing interests use and appropriate historical imagery at cross-purposes, mediated through asymmetries 3 Anti-blackness circulates globally and is a global issue even as racialisation is also shaped by local contexts.…”

“…All of these were structural elements of imperialism. 5 Indeed, facilitating human mobility was crucial for the profitability of imperial territories, particularly as colonialism resulted in the high death rates of the colonised, itself often a result of their enslavement. 6 Moreover, the high death rate of enslaved persons from Africa, from Europe and Asia indentured labourers, and even of socalled free labour, also required an ongoing replenishment of labour power in the colonies.…”

“…Scotland Yard found isolated cases of exploitation but no evidence of systematic traffic in women. 5 Similarly, Sir Edward Ridley Colborne Bradford, the then head of London Police, argued that 'genuine cases are few far and in between'. 6 In 1912 at the height of the second wave of white slavery hysteria, Teresa BillingtonGreig, the founder of the Women's Freedom League, analysed crime reports and contested the existence of white slavery.…”

“…Users must always give proper attribution to the authors and the Anti-Trafficking Review. 5,000 dead at sea in 2016. 1 The fact that people would be forced to risk their lives to migrate is frequently blamed on the presence of human smugglers and traffickers, whose criminality is uncritically assumed.…”

“…I am also not interested in contributing to scholarship that argues for a hierarchisation of oppression. Rather, I am preoccupied with questions about how histories of slavery and bound labour 4 in areas of the world such as the Caribbean can be seen as 'parallel lives and intertwined belongings', which produce different knowledge and understandings, 5 and which in turn could influence current thinking about human trafficking and 'modern slavery'. Moreover, as a critical sociologist, inspired by a historical materialist reading of the social and political, this paper does not engage with debates about the 'use and abuse' of history.…”