Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children's movement in Benin and Ethiopia

Abstract

(2013) "Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children's movement in Benin and Ethiopia", Children's Geographies 11(3): 354-368.

The absent presence: Children's place in narratives of human trafficking

“…We conclude that children's presence cuts across different spatialities and episodes of human trafficking, and these geographies of children's presence in human trafficking warrant further attention. Our empirical data support the critical claims that exploitation cannot be conceptualised as binary dynamics between the traffickers and the trafficked (see Andrijasevic & Mai, ; Boyden & Howard, ; Huijsmans & Baker, ). Rather, children highlight the compound web of structural conditions, embodied interactions and social relationships evolving across space and time which necessitate situated responses to children's specific exposure to abuse and exploitation.…”

“…Universalist conceptions of “children in need” do not necessarily acknowledge the local and situated contexts of children's lives. For instance, equating children's mobility and activities that are unsupervised or supervised outside the scope of family and the State automatically with child exploitation overlooks the diversity of “historical and economic‐moral” (Boyden & Howard, , p. 365), familial (Beazley, ) and peer (Heissler, ) relations in which children's experiences evolve and in which children emerge as actors interlinked and interdependent with others. Even the policies intended to protect children from human trafficking might have both protective and punitive effects and rather than simply imposing supervisory measures on children and their social networks, they trigger active responses in the form of resistance and reworking of regulatory regimes (Aufseeser, ).…”

“…Human trafficking has become a significant issue in legal and policy debates on contemporary forms of exploitation and human rights abuses (Howard, ; O'Connell Davidson, ). Children are often a focal point in these discussions, as well as in related critical scholarship regarding the conceptualisation of human trafficking within legal frameworks (Hynes, ; O'Connell Davidson, ), sociological studies (Boyden & Howard, ; O'Connell Davidson, ), and popular and/or media representations (Andrijasevic & Mai, ; Yea, ). This literature is often situated within a wider intellectual movement seeking to (re)theorise relations between borders, human agency and state apparatus.…”

Escape to victory: Development, youth entrepreneurship and the migration of Ghanaian footballers

“…I bring these insights from the Ghanaian context into conversation with research highlighting how movement is often seen as emblematic of social status, and spatial mobility is often linked to aspirations to attain social mobility (Boyden and Howard, 2013;Gough, 2008;Nyamnjoh, 2013;Porter et al, 2010;Salazar, 2011). This resonates with work on young people in sub-Saharan Africa highlighting the prevalence of what Kalir (2005) has termed a 'migratory disposition' (see Langevang, 2008a;Jua, 2003).…”

School holidays: examining childhood, gender norms, and kinship in children's shorter-term residential mobility in urban Zambia

“…Boys were more often perceived as making their own decisions to go on holiday (p=0.050) (see Table 3 and Figure 2 for breakdown). 8 This finding is supported by recent research on child migration in sub-Saharan Africa that shows that girls are less able than boys to assert their movement preferences (Abebe and Kjørholt, 2009, Boyden and Howard, 2013). In the qualitative study, parents and guardians monitored girls’ movements much more heavily than boys.…”