Enviado desde Yahoo Mail en Android
De:"'niem.migr' NIEM.migr@xxxxxxxxx [niem_rj]" <niem_rj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Fecha:Mié., Oct. 14, a.m. a 3:27 a.m.
Asunto:[NIEM] The creation of ‘trafficking’
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/mike-dottridge/creation-of-%E2%80%98trafficking%E2%80%99
The creation of ‘trafficking’
Mike Dottridge 28 July 2015
Trafficking received its current definition only fifteen years ago. Since that
time, the policies pursued in its name have done incalculable damage to the
children they purport to protect.
 Washing dishes at a streetside eatery in Cotonou, Benin. Adam Cohn/Flickr.
Creative Commons.
Many children in west Africa are brought up in households belonging to people
other than their own parents. There is a long tradition of fostering, yet in
many cases the practice is now considered to constitute ‘trafficking’ or
‘modern slavery’ because the children involved are put to work during their
stay. This makes little sense, yet the terminology of ‘human trafficking’ and
its consequences—namely that the ‘traffickers’ involved should be
prosecuted—has remained in vogue since at least 2000 with the support of
European and American funding. This has almost certainly caused more harm than
good.
Alongside these foster children are the tens of thousands of independent
adolescent migrants who deliberately leave home to search of work. In both
scenarios some children are badly exploited and abused. Those that live with
their employers, such as the region’s hundreds of thousands of child domestic
workers, are particularly vulnerable. However, some prosper and flourish.
Efforts to curb exploitation over the past two decades have foundered because
they have been based on ideas and methods imported from Europe and North
America. By and large they have sought to prevent children from working away
from home, rather than to protect children from harm regardless of where they
live and whether they were at work or school. This approach fails to adapt to
the realities of childhood in west Africa and the practicalities of growing up
in villages with little infrastructure.
The creation of ‘trafficking’
The abuse of live-in child domestic workers began to be documented
systematically in countries such as the Benin Republic, Nigeria and Togo during
the mid-1990s. At the time I worked as the director of Anti-Slavery
International, a London-based charity that became highly involved in the
process of identifying the region’s exploited children, recording their
testimonies, and generating policy measures to protect them more effectively.
However, these efforts became entangled in well-intentioned developments
outside the region.
Researchers quickly established that many hundreds of children from Benin and
Togo were being shipped across the sea each year to work for west African
households in Gabon—a richer, petrol-exporting country. This ‘movement for
work’ was labelled ‘trafficking’ in English and ‘trafic’ in French, which has
slightly different connotations but nonetheless implies contraband taken across
a border. At the time, neither word had a precise technical, yet alone legal
meaning. When the first findings of research in Gabon were published in 2000,
all 133 west African girls and one boy who were interviewed in Gabon were
described as “trafiquées” (translated into English as “trafficked”). This meant
that they, like most west African adults who sought a living in Gabon, had
arrived in Gabon as undocumented migrants.
‘Trafic’ and ‘trafficking’ acquired their legal meanings with the United
Nation’s adoption of two treaties in 2000. The first defined ‘trafficking in
persons’ as a criminal act, implying the need to prosecute those responsible.
The second declared the term ‘trafic’ (in French) to mean ‘smuggling migrants
across a border’. At the same time, the United States adopted its own law on
‘trafficking in persons’ and launched a global crusade to seek more
prosecutions and heavier punishments for traffickers.
The virulence of inaccuracy
These developments were, in many ways, disastrous for children, as they induced
many west African states to produce policies and laws to stop one of the main
methods used by young people in west Africa to get on in the world. Benin,
ostensibly seeking to punish child traffickers, adopted a new law in 2006 that
stopped anyone under 18 from moving away from home without an official permit.
Benin’s Ministry of Family and Children, in a national study published in 2007
and supported by UNICEF, estimated that over 40,000 Beninese children were
“victims of trafficking” and that each year almost 15,000 children were
trafficked. The implication was that a massive two percent of the country’s
children were in the hands of criminals, even though the employment of children
as live-in domestics and in other jobs continued to be socially acceptable.
On the face of it a national study should have been authoritative; however the
criteria used for assessing which children had been trafficked were far too
wide. Any child working away from home was identified as ‘trafficked’. The
study itself reported that just 2,066 children out of 40,000 had been “moved by
a broker”. The other 38,000 children had migrated voluntarily but were
considered “exploited” because they were working away from home, not because
they had complained about their working conditions or felt they were worse off
than when living with their parents. Ironically, the study did not even mention
children who were earning a living from commercial sex, even though research a
few years earlier had identified adolescent sex workers in the capital,
including Nigerian girls brought there to earn money for people who paid for
their journeys.
Once inaccurate information is publicised, it is remarkable how it circulates
endlessly. In this case, a UN special rapporteur investigating the sale of
children and child prostitution was told while visiting Benin in 2013 that
40,000 children were trafficking victims, most of them girls working as live-in
domestics. Another UN specialist working in Gabon, herself from Nigeria,
acknowledged that ‘child fostering’ in itself did not amount to trafficking,
but “may be abused and can become a form of exploitation in which children work
long hours without schooling”. The figure of 40,000 trafficked children was
repeated in a report for the 2015 International Labour Conference and Radio
France International referred to Benin’s “40,000 child slaves” in a broadcast
in April 2015.
The wrong cause
However, the real problem goes much deeper that the replication of erroneous
statistics or even the false designation of many adults and children as
‘traffickers’ and ‘trafficked’. The world’s preoccupation with stopping
children from working, and especially working away from home, has prevented
Benin and other countries from introducing effective measures to protect
migrant and working children. On the contrary, the policies resulting from this
drive have, if anything, made life more difficult for them. Their combined
effect has been to increase the bribes paid to border officials and to
encourage the use of clandestine and dangerous ways of transporting child
workers. They have demonstrably not improved working conditions or promoted the
rights of child workers.
As one of those responsible for bringing the situation of Benin’s child workers
to public attention in the 1990s, I cannot comprehend why international
organisations and western donors do not pay more attention to the views
expressed by the young people who are at the heart of this issue. An academic
article published five years ago quoted a group of children in Benin as saying
that if they were members of parliament, they would not prohibit children from
working either in Benin or abroad. Instead, they would insist on the working
conditions being made acceptable, at least as long as it was not possible to
guarantee that the alternative for children would be quality schooling.
About the author
Mike Dottridge is the former director of Anti-Slavery International (1996-2002)
and currently a trustee of the United Nations Voluntary Fund on Contemporary
Forms of Slavery. He worked at a university in Nigeria in the 1970s and
currently works as a consultant on human rights. Follow Mike on Twitter
@MikeDottridge
__._,_.___
Enviado por: "niem.migr" <NIEM.migr@xxxxxxxxx>
Responder através da web • • através de email • Adicionar um novo tópico •
Mensagens neste tópico (1)
[As opiniões veiculadas não expressam (necessariamente) a opinião dos
organizadores da lista do NIEM]
Para cancelar sua assinatura desse grupo, favor enviar um e-mail para:
niem_rj-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To cancel your subscription to this group, please send an e-mail to:
niem_rj-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
para enviar mensagens / to send messages: niem_rj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Visite seu Grupo

• Privacidade • Sair do grupo • Termos de uso
.


__,_._,___
