‘Shock and awe’: A critique of the Ghana-centric child trafficking discourse

Abstract

This paper is a critique of the dominant anti-trafficking discourse and activism in Ghana. It argues that the discourse grossly underplays the role of external forces in shaping the conditions underpinning children's labour mobility in the past and the hardships underpinning the phenomenon today. In place of critical analysis and understanding, anti-child-trafficking campaigns employ melodramatic 'shock and awe' tactics and a tendency to blame local culture or traditions for activists' claims of 'pervasive' child trafficking in the country. The paper suggests that dominant anti-trafficking discourse and activism in Ghana thus reinvigorate historic and persistent external causal agents of inequality which drive Ghanaian children's labour mobility today. The paper demonstrates this problem and offers correctives to it.

Theorising ‘Harm’ in Relation to Children’s Work

“…Yet a large body of ethnographic data now show that, in many cases, children are able to prolong their schooling in contexts where it carries hidden or heavy opportunity costs, precisely by working, including in circumstances deemed harmful. Okyere (2017a) has demonstrated this in Ghana with a compelling case study of children working in quarries. His findings are echoed by Maconachie and Hilson (2016) in the context of artisanal mining in Sierra Leone, as well as in case studies from across the African continent assembled by Hashim and Thorsen (2011).…”

From recognising health rights to realising labour protections? Sex work, ILOAIDS and the Decent Work Agenda in Ghana

“…4 Yet, it is also the case that slavery and trafficking as a paradigm has come to dominate the international policy space around informal migration and sex work in a way that has led to misunderstanding and mischaracterisation of their root causes and effects, particularly where this has dovetailed with international government interest in increased security and tightening border and immigration regimes (O’Connell Davidson, 2013 , 2015 ). In the Ghanaian context, Samuel Okyere ( 2017 : 103) highlights the partial and problematic evidence base that informs NGO-led anti-child trafficking discourse and how this limits policymakers’ ability to understand “the underlying causes of Ghanaian children’s labour mobility”, which reflect both historical and contemporary dynamics of inequality, including legacies of colonial underdevelopment in Northern Ghana. In terms of patterns of adult labour mobility in the sex sector specifically, there is a similar scarcity of data on the actual existing labour conditions encountered by migrant women workers and how these link to the political economy of (feminised) migration, patterns of uneven development and the social relations of production and reproduction.…”

“…At a more macrolevel, recent feminist political economy analyses of the SDGs and decent work agenda from a gendered perspective (Rai et al, 2019 ) and specifically the “promises and pitfalls” of the SDGs for advancing sex workers’ rights (Elias and Holliday, 2019 ) further illuminate the contradictions and tensions that inhere in the current global development policy on decent work, as well as the need to prioritise a “gender and labour rights approach” (Rai et al, 2019 : 368) in relation to (paid and unpaid) domestic and sex work. When it comes to policy-focused studies on sex work in Africa, however, the literature is broadly bifurcated; on the one hand, studies examine anti-trafficking and slavery approaches, with a particular focus on child trafficking (on Ghana see Okyere, 2017 ; Manzo, 2005 ); on the other, a vast public health literature looks at HIV policies and other sexual and reproductive health issues among sex workers (on Ghana, see Onyango et al, 2015 ; Laar & DeBruin, 2017 ). This paper seeks to both build on the feminist political economy literature on decent work and the SDGs and move beyond a focus on either public health or anti-trafficking in Africa by examining how NGO interventions focused on “Female Sex Workers” (dis)connect to/from broader development policy efforts around HIV and decent work.…”

Children’s Harmful Work in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fisheries: Research Needed to Move Beyond Discourses of Child Trafficking

“…The work of Béné and Russell (2007) and Okyere (2017), along with some of the observations made in the study by ILO-IPEC (2013), begin to draw attention to the wider historical context of the drivers of children's work in fisheries. The colonial and postcolonial context of north to south labour migration, the displacement of households during the creation of Lake Volta and structural adjustment policies all form part of the background to the impoverishment of fishing communities (ILO-IPEC 2013; Okyere 2017).…”