A Syrian family proceeds north to Serbia from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in August 2015. Stephen Ryan for the IFRC/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Child trafficking generates great anxiety amongst professionals, parents, and the general public. It is simply an abhorrent idea: how could adults buy and sell vulnerable children? Extensive effort has thus been put into combatting the practice. In the UK, local authorities have drafted guidelines for identifying and working with trafficked children, and child trafficking units have been established across many counties in the country. These and other efforts might suggest that we are faced with a severe and growing problem; a child trafficking epidemic that demands increasing attention and resources. But is that really so? What is the extent of the problem, and indeed, when authorities talk about child trafficking, what do they actually mean? Scrutiny of the policy discourse and available evidence shows that often a very different reality exists than the image of ‘trafficking’ shown to the public.
Child trafficking, according to the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), is when children are recruited, moved or transported, and then exploited, forced to work or sold. They are often subject to multiple forms of exploitation. Children are trafficked for: child sexual exploitation, benefit fraud, forced marriage, domestic servitude such as cleaning, childcare, cooking, forced labour in factories or agriculture, criminal activity such as pickpocketing, begging, transporting drugs, working on cannabis farms, selling pirated DVDs, and bag theft. It is often asserted that many children are trafficked into the UK from abroad, though children are also said to be trafficked from one part of the UK to another. Figures from the UK National Crime Agency’s third annual Strategic Assessment of the Nature and Scale of Human Trafficking in 2013 (released in September 2014) estimated that of the 2,744 people identified as potential victims of trafficking, 602 were children; an increase of 22 percent from 2012.
