Mali. Noemi Jariod/Flickr. Creative Commons.
A leading children’s charity tells us that child trafficking is child abuse. The largest online encyclopaedia goes so far as to describe it as the sale of children. Neither of these definitions, of course, is accurate. Nevertheless, they are representative of the discourse surrounding the movement of young people in the company of adults who are not their parents.
The actual, legal definition of trafficking is that which is laid out in the Palermo Protocol, formally known as the United Nation's (2000) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. According to this protocol, the distinction between smuggling and trafficking is that the former refers to the movement of individuals where the individual has consented, while trafficking involves threat or the use of force or other forms of coercion. However, article three of the protocol makes it explicit that in the case of those under the age of 18, consent is irrelevant if their movement is considered to be for the purposes of exploitation.
