Young men work on a building site in Dhaka. BBC World Service/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Media reports and policy documents on human trafficking often focus on the exploitation and harm experienced by child and young migrants. In the absence of reports on mobility practices more broadly, the focus on trafficking risks generalising young people’s migration to the point of misrepresentation. More specifically, it suggests that all young people’s movements entail harm and exploitation. In order to avoid this, we must situate young people’s movements within a wider understanding of mobility and the processes affecting it. This will help us to better comprehend the factors motivating mobility and to develop a more contextualised, dynamic understanding of the risks and opportunities presented by migration. What, then, leads young persons to migrate? What experiences do they have?
Across Asia, where I have done most of my research, the mobility of children and young people for work or schooling is a long established rite of passage. The migration patterns of these children, however, have been changing as agricultural livelihoods have become less sustainable and as educational systems have modernised. These shifts have prevented many young persons from pursuing viable livelihoods locally, and in any case fewer and fewer are interested in farming, the traditional livelihoods of their parents.
