Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Global child trafficking

2004; Elsevier BV; Volume: 364; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(04)17624-1

1474-547X

Chris Beyrer,

Migration, Health and Trauma

Child soldiers in LiberiaView Large Image Copyright © 2004 Panos PicturesHuman Rights Watch has defined child trafficking as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of a child for the purposes of sexual or labour exploitation, forced labour, or slavery". Child trafficking, always an affront to human dignity, invariably involves violations of several core human rights. In those states that are signatory to the widely ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is also generally a crime. Trafficked children face an array of threats to their health, development, wellbeing, and in some cases, to their lives. For the subset trafficked into sexual servitude, HIV/AIDS is a clear and present danger. For those forced into military or paramilitary settings in conflict zones, the risks to life and limb are likewise grave.To imagine a more obvious moral wrong is hard. So it should not surprise us that child trafficking has generated indignation and advocacy with fervour reminiscent of the abolitionist movements against slavery in the British Empire and the USA. The Bush administration in particular has made trafficking of children (and women) a high foreign-policy priority and now demands that all recipients of US aid have policies in place that explicitly oppose the trafficking of women and children. Yet child trafficking remains a very difficult problem to study and one for which debate has often generated more heat than light. We know trafficking in children is abominable. What we don't know is how common the problem actually is, how important the health risks associated with it may be at population levels, and how best to address the complex set of issues trafficking raises. We do know that at the level of the individual child, trafficking is fraught with physical and mental health threats, and that access to care for these vulnerable children is sharply limited by the exploitative and hidden nature of each situation. These children rarely encounter health-care providers, and when they do, their status as trafficked children is likely to go unrecognised and unreported. The lack of recognition of trafficked persons in health-care settings has been well described for trafficked women, but is much less understood for children, who may be highly unlikely to understand the nature of their situation and unaware of their rights.How serious is this problem? The number of children trafficked worldwide is notoriously difficult to measure. It is clear, however, that child trafficking is a problem of very wide geographic distribution. Most groups working on the issue agree that roughly 1 to 1·2 million children are trafficked globally each year. Regions with substantial child trafficking burdens in 2004 include west Africa, with at least 13 countries involved; south Asia, particularly India and Nepal; southeast Asia, where the ongoing civil conflict in Burma drives a regional problem; central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, with trafficking largely into western Europe; Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States; and Latin America, especially Colombia and Mexico, with substantial trafficking to the USA—in short, much of the world. Most children are trafficked for cheap and controllable labour. They work in homes, on farms, in factories, at carpet looms, in sweatshops, in restaurants, and on construction sites, in conditions that can include debt bondage and slavery. But they are also trafficked for adoption, for sexual exploitation, arranged marriages, and, perhaps most heinously, for their organs.Underlying the global traffic in children are some harsh realities, including the vast and widening gap between the poor of the world and those with greater resources and choices. And there are structural forces driving child trafficking that are likely to increase it and that should inspire much more effort from an array of partners. One key driving force is child labour. In 2003, the International Labour Organisation estimated that perhaps 8 million children were living in slavery or debt bondage, largely as an outcome of trafficking. But these children were a small minority of the estimated 246 million child labourers worldwide—about 16% of the world's children in 2003. While forced labour and trafficking are human rights violations, many of the world's children must work to survive or to help their families survive. This painful reality is impossible to legislate away and cannot be addressed simply by stiffening penalties against traffickers. The demand for ever cheaper and more compliant labour is large and growing. Child trafficking will almost certainly continue as long as demand for labour and widespread tolerance of the exploitation of child labourers continue.Another driver of child trafficking is the increasing use of children by armies, militias, and paramilitary organisations in global conflict zones. Forced child soldiers have been a prominent feature of recent and ongoing civil conflicts in Burma, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cöte d'Ivoire, and other zones of social disruption and chaos. Children are especially vulnerable to the informal paramilitary entities that operate largely independent of state organisations, and have been used for nightmarish tasks that include the clearing of landmines, and use as porters and servants, and for sexual services. As the world's conflicts increasingly involve civilian populations and informal paramilitaries as opposed to professional armies, children have become more vulnerable. Girls in conflict zones are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. In general, all of these children face not only serious risks to physical health, but also special and severe forms of mental health threats associated with witnessing and participating in violence.The right to an identity and a nationality begins at birth. In a world with civil conflicts, refugees, large-scale migrations, and trafficking, increasing numbers of children are born without the most basic forms of documentation. Imagine a modern life with no formal registration, birth certificate, passport, or citizenship. This is the fate of (all too literally) countless children born in the limbo of refugee, migrant, persecuted minority, or illegal alien status. These children are by far the most vulnerable to trafficking and to exploitation. There are, as an example, about 1 million Burmese migrants living in Thailand, of whom roughly 400 000 had official status as registered migrant labourers in 2004. The majority have no such status, with some having been in Thailand since the 1988 democracy uprising in Burma. Tens of thousands of children have been born to these migrants, with neither Thai nor Burmese recognition of their birth. They are trafficked into begging, into selling flowers on the streets of Bangkok, as domestics, as restaurant staff, and, in some cases, for sex. Without documentation, they are turned away from schools, legal work, and the rights "legal" children have to social programmes and to health care. When faced with these stark limitations, even the most loving and concerned parents may agree to hand over their children to brokers and job agents for sheer survival. Much trafficking begins at home.Lastly, there is another driver of trafficking that is not likely to diminish in the near term. Those familiar with data on the AIDS pandemic know that HIV/AIDS has generated more than 14 million new orphans (defined as having lost one or both parents to AIDS) and that more than 90% of these orphans live in developing countries. In hardest hit states, predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, communities have lost so many adults that traditional extended families may not be able to help. For these orphans, work may be essential to survival, and being without parents makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking, and HIV.What can be done? Since 2001, the US State Department has conducted an annual global assessment and issued a report on Trafficking in Persons (TIPS), which assesses a country's efforts to combat trafficking. TIPS ranks states into three tiers based on compliance with minimum standards. These standards, largely punitive in nature, include prohibition of trafficking and punishment of traffickers; punishment for grave crimes, including rape, kidnapping, and crimes that result in the victim's death; and punishment stringent enough to deter trafficking. Countries in which governments fully comply with these minimum standards are grouped into the first tier. Tier 2 countries are those deemed not in compliance, but making "significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance". Tier 3 states are not in compliance and are deemed to be not making significant efforts. In 2003, there were eight countries in this category: Belize, Burma, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Republic of Georgia, Greece, and Haiti. TIPS tier status is linked to an array of incentives and strictures and has been a useful tool in inducing states to prosecute trafficking cases. Clearly, however, legalistic and punitive approaches are not enough.Prevention of trafficking is an emerging intervention accomplished largely through mass education campaigns in source areas. As with trafficking in general, the effectiveness of prevention programmes has proven very difficult to measure. Health-care providers are most effective in two areas: identifying children in health-care settings who may be victims of trafficking, and dealing with the results of trafficking once children are secure and out of trafficked situations. As with other forms of abuse, providers need training in how to recognise trafficking situations and how to respond to them. This is a special challenge when dealing with younger children, who may have little or no ability to speak out to providers on their plight. This concern is relevant to children in well-resourced settings, but may have little relevance to children and their families in settings with limited resources where child labour is common. Ultimately, of course, children belong in school, not on worksites, for both their own and their communities' lasting development. Child trafficking must be vigorously opposed, but the rights of the world's impoverished children to a safe childhood, citizenship, health-care access, and an education must be much more vigorously supported if we are to have an impact on this cruel trade. Human Rights Watch has defined child trafficking as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of a child for the purposes of sexual or labour exploitation, forced labour, or slavery". Child trafficking, always an affront to human dignity, invariably involves violations of several core human rights. In those states that are signatory to the widely ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is also generally a crime. Trafficked children face an array of threats to their health, development, wellbeing, and in some cases, to their lives. For the subset trafficked into sexual servitude, HIV/AIDS is a clear and present danger. For those forced into military or paramilitary settings in conflict zones, the risks to life and limb are likewise grave. To imagine a more obvious moral wrong is hard. So it should not surprise us that child trafficking has generated indignation and advocacy with fervour reminiscent of the abolitionist movements against slavery in the British Empire and the USA. The Bush administration in particular has made trafficking of children (and women) a high foreign-policy priority and now demands that all recipients of US aid have policies in place that explicitly oppose the trafficking of women and children. Yet child trafficking remains a very difficult problem to study and one for which debate has often generated more heat than light. We know trafficking in children is abominable. What we don't know is how common the problem actually is, how important the health risks associated with it may be at population levels, and how best to address the complex set of issues trafficking raises. We do know that at the level of the individual child, trafficking is fraught with physical and mental health threats, and that access to care for these vulnerable children is sharply limited by the exploitative and hidden nature of each situation. These children rarely encounter health-care providers, and when they do, their status as trafficked children is likely to go unrecognised and unreported. The lack of recognition of trafficked persons in health-care settings has been well described for trafficked women, but is much less understood for children, who may be highly unlikely to understand the nature of their situation and unaware of their rights. How serious is this problem? The number of children trafficked worldwide is notoriously difficult to measure. It is clear, however, that child trafficking is a problem of very wide geographic distribution. Most groups working on the issue agree that roughly 1 to 1·2 million children are trafficked globally each year. Regions with substantial child trafficking burdens in 2004 include west Africa, with at least 13 countries involved; south Asia, particularly India and Nepal; southeast Asia, where the ongoing civil conflict in Burma drives a regional problem; central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, with trafficking largely into western Europe; Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States; and Latin America, especially Colombia and Mexico, with substantial trafficking to the USA—in short, much of the world. Most children are trafficked for cheap and controllable labour. They work in homes, on farms, in factories, at carpet looms, in sweatshops, in restaurants, and on construction sites, in conditions that can include debt bondage and slavery. But they are also trafficked for adoption, for sexual exploitation, arranged marriages, and, perhaps most heinously, for their organs. Underlying the global traffic in children are some harsh realities, including the vast and widening gap between the poor of the world and those with greater resources and choices. And there are structural forces driving child trafficking that are likely to increase it and that should inspire much more effort from an array of partners. One key driving force is child labour. In 2003, the International Labour Organisation estimated that perhaps 8 million children were living in slavery or debt bondage, largely as an outcome of trafficking. But these children were a small minority of the estimated 246 million child labourers worldwide—about 16% of the world's children in 2003. While forced labour and trafficking are human rights violations, many of the world's children must work to survive or to help their families survive. This painful reality is impossible to legislate away and cannot be addressed simply by stiffening penalties against traffickers. The demand for ever cheaper and more compliant labour is large and growing. Child trafficking will almost certainly continue as long as demand for labour and widespread tolerance of the exploitation of child labourers continue. Another driver of child trafficking is the increasing use of children by armies, militias, and paramilitary organisations in global conflict zones. Forced child soldiers have been a prominent feature of recent and ongoing civil conflicts in Burma, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cöte d'Ivoire, and other zones of social disruption and chaos. Children are especially vulnerable to the informal paramilitary entities that operate largely independent of state organisations, and have been used for nightmarish tasks that include the clearing of landmines, and use as porters and servants, and for sexual services. As the world's conflicts increasingly involve civilian populations and informal paramilitaries as opposed to professional armies, children have become more vulnerable. Girls in conflict zones are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. In general, all of these children face not only serious risks to physical health, but also special and severe forms of mental health threats associated with witnessing and participating in violence. The right to an identity and a nationality begins at birth. In a world with civil conflicts, refugees, large-scale migrations, and trafficking, increasing numbers of children are born without the most basic forms of documentation. Imagine a modern life with no formal registration, birth certificate, passport, or citizenship. This is the fate of (all too literally) countless children born in the limbo of refugee, migrant, persecuted minority, or illegal alien status. These children are by far the most vulnerable to trafficking and to exploitation. There are, as an example, about 1 million Burmese migrants living in Thailand, of whom roughly 400 000 had official status as registered migrant labourers in 2004. The majority have no such status, with some having been in Thailand since the 1988 democracy uprising in Burma. Tens of thousands of children have been born to these migrants, with neither Thai nor Burmese recognition of their birth. They are trafficked into begging, into selling flowers on the streets of Bangkok, as domestics, as restaurant staff, and, in some cases, for sex. Without documentation, they are turned away from schools, legal work, and the rights "legal" children have to social programmes and to health care. When faced with these stark limitations, even the most loving and concerned parents may agree to hand over their children to brokers and job agents for sheer survival. Much trafficking begins at home. Lastly, there is another driver of trafficking that is not likely to diminish in the near term. Those familiar with data on the AIDS pandemic know that HIV/AIDS has generated more than 14 million new orphans (defined as having lost one or both parents to AIDS) and that more than 90% of these orphans live in developing countries. In hardest hit states, predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, communities have lost so many adults that traditional extended families may not be able to help. For these orphans, work may be essential to survival, and being without parents makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking, and HIV. What can be done? Since 2001, the US State Department has conducted an annual global assessment and issued a report on Trafficking in Persons (TIPS), which assesses a country's efforts to combat trafficking. TIPS ranks states into three tiers based on compliance with minimum standards. These standards, largely punitive in nature, include prohibition of trafficking and punishment of traffickers; punishment for grave crimes, including rape, kidnapping, and crimes that result in the victim's death; and punishment stringent enough to deter trafficking. Countries in which governments fully comply with these minimum standards are grouped into the first tier. Tier 2 countries are those deemed not in compliance, but making "significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance". Tier 3 states are not in compliance and are deemed to be not making significant efforts. In 2003, there were eight countries in this category: Belize, Burma, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Republic of Georgia, Greece, and Haiti. TIPS tier status is linked to an array of incentives and strictures and has been a useful tool in inducing states to prosecute trafficking cases. Clearly, however, legalistic and punitive approaches are not enough. Prevention of trafficking is an emerging intervention accomplished largely through mass education campaigns in source areas. As with trafficking in general, the effectiveness of prevention programmes has proven very difficult to measure. Health-care providers are most effective in two areas: identifying children in health-care settings who may be victims of trafficking, and dealing with the results of trafficking once children are secure and out of trafficked situations. As with other forms of abuse, providers need training in how to recognise trafficking situations and how to respond to them. This is a special challenge when dealing with younger children, who may have little or no ability to speak out to providers on their plight. This concern is relevant to children in well-resourced settings, but may have little relevance to children and their families in settings with limited resources where child labour is common. Ultimately, of course, children belong in school, not on worksites, for both their own and their communities' lasting development. Child trafficking must be vigorously opposed, but the rights of the world's impoverished children to a safe childhood, citizenship, health-care access, and an education must be much more vigorously supported if we are to have an impact on this cruel trade.