In 2009, the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (OMCTP) identified Ghana as “a source, transit, and destination country for children and women trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation.” It further noted, “trafficking within the country is more prevalent than transnational trafficking and the majority of victims are children.” Whereas in 2002 and 2003, Ghana's “fully compliant” engagement with United States-led anti-trafficking initiatives was rewarded with inclusion in the highest classification (Tier One), six years later the OMCTP observed that “the government demonstrated weak efforts in prosecuting and punishing trafficking offenders.”Footnote 1 Ghana's regressive trajectory is unusual in a region undergoing increased funding, surveillance, and criminalization with regard to trafficking. Indeed, until the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century Ghana's commitment to anti-trafficking was celebrated as a model by child advocacy agencies. Ghana was demoted to the Tier Two Watch List, a new category created to punish states that fail to maintain anti-trafficking policies and enforce existing domestic legislation.Footnote 2 The vibrancy of domestic anti-trafficking activity, both government-sponsored and privately initiated, underscores the seemingly paradoxical nature of the US critique.
This article originated as an attempt to interrogate this apparent administrative regression and the perception of inefficacy. It examines the relationship between multidimensional child advocacy campaigns and the enactment of Ghana's Human Trafficking Act (2005). I argue that while child advocacy has a rich history in West Africa, the diffuse labor-oriented approach characteristic of the 1990s failed to articulate an achievable goal. Child labor advocacy was particularly impotent because the diverse national, regional, and international agencies involved adopted different positions about the relative permissibility of child labor. By contrast, the anti-trafficking initiatives of the early 2000s focused narrowly on legislative remedy and formulated a discourse of “crisis” that concealed the intractable debates hindering more diffuse child labor advocacy campaigns. An anti-trafficking coalition of internal and external agencies built on an industry regulation model resulting from international concern about child involvement in cocoa production. A legislative remedy to child trafficking gained additional support with the creation of the OMCTP. As agents of social and political change, domestic, regional, and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) played important roles in shaping debates and framing new laws, but the results appear to be of little import. The Ghanaian law is of limited effectiveness: Rather than engaging with autochthonous causes, including complex social practices with historically rich traditions (like child fosterage, rearing, and labor), it enjoined a narrow, economic model for the proliferation of trafficking.
Accounting for the discursive shift among child advocacy agencies—from a labor focus to an anti-trafficking agenda—directs attention to the legitimacy of the laboring subject and the role of the cocoa industry.Footnote 3 Similar realignments elsewhere have distinguished between local and international NGOs and interpreted this dynamic as reflecting global trends toward internationalizing human rights.Footnote 4 While such a distinction is important, in Ghana domestic, international, and subregional NGOs are involved in many facets of child advocacy humanitarianism. Upon closer examination, the shift from exploitative labor to child trafficking reflects a larger shift among political elites, away from ambitious social reform agendas directed at ending child abuse and toward narrower neoliberal validation of “legitimate” proprietary and employment rights juxtaposed with “illegitimate” labor.Footnote 5 Many agencies, especially the International Labor Organization (ILO), adopted language and standards reflecting the emerging consensus that only a positivist law-oriented campaign articulating legitimate practices could effect systemic change.Footnote 6 The discursive shift built on an economic reframing of child labor as an endemic consequence of “stark poverty,” for which remedy is impossible, and then resituated trafficking as especially heinous, derivative, and illegitimate.Footnote 7 Trafficking children thus became an eliminable form of what would otherwise be legitimate proprietary rights in autonomous laboring subjects. In this light, the attendant ideologies of neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking rhetoric are revealed to have striking parallels to the discourse of “legitimate” commerce accompanying nineteenth-century abolitionism.Footnote 8
I approach these debates with a historian's training. Marginalia by colonial officials working in neighboring British-mandated Togoland first drew my attention to the expansive nature of child labor markets within interwar West African peasant economies. The small Togoland territory was, in the minds of many administrators, “nothing more than a conduit” of trade in goods and people.Footnote 9 Officials tried various mechanisms—legal, economic, bureaucratic, and others—to control production and labor. But the abundance of labor and a concomitant weak labor market frustrated European attempts to manipulate peasant economies in general and cocoa production in particular.Footnote 10
I begin this article with a discussion of the empirical dimensions of child labor and trafficking in Ghana, one case study in a subregion deeply affected by child labor and trafficking.Footnote 11 I then offer an explanation of how child advocacy issues, including slavery, labor, and mobility in the primarily peasant economy, have been approached historically by state and nonstate actors during the colonial and postcolonial eras. I then turn to the dynamics of contemporary child advocacy, including child labor, industry self-regulation, and anti-trafficking and attempt to account for the discursive shift. In the final section, I consider the efficacy of the recently passed law within wider regional trends.
The Dimensions of Child Labor and Child Trafficking
The scale of Ghanaian child labor is better documented than trafficking, but both are constitutive of a “hidden population.”Footnote 12 The stigma associated with many practices often renders the sampled population uncooperative and unreliable.Footnote 13 Empirical data, while scant, may be domestic, regional, continental, and international; labor and trafficking may be conflated, compared, or separate.Footnote 14 The period 1990–2007 marked an increase in research and publication highlighting aspects of child labor and child trafficking.Footnote 15 Domestic agencies only began to “acknowledge” the extent of child trafficking in the mid-1990s.Footnote 16 Prior to this, few agencies addressed the issue.Footnote 17 Research in West Africa prioritizes data “about young children recruited and transported across frontiers and later exploited” for agriculture, domestic service, and the sex industry.Footnote 18
The first taxonomy of the “problem,” based partly on Ghanaian data, highlighted mobility and divided trafficking into six typologies: abduction of children; payment of money to impoverished parents who bond children with assumptions about treatment; bonding of children for debt; the token placement for specified duration or gift; fee-based agent-directed domestic work at parents' request; and deception of parents into enlisting children for education or skill.Footnote 19 Aderanti Adepoju revised this into three supracategories based on labor: “[1] trafficking in children primarily for farm labour and domestic work within and across countries; [2] trafficking in women and young persons for sexual exploitation, mainly outside the region; and [3] trafficking in women from outside the region for the sex industry.”Footnote 20
Comprehensive data sets are rare, but national surveys give a picture of labor and trafficking.Footnote 21 The Ghana Child Labour Survey estimated 1 million to 1.4 million child laborers but set this against constraints on child work in the 1998 Children's Act. Whereas thirty-one percent of children were identified as “working,” only twenty percent were considered engaged in “child labour.” Of these, fifty-seven percent work in agriculture and fishing, twenty-one percent as hawkers/vendors, and eleven percent in “general labor”; a third of all child laborers worked full-time. While the “underlying reasons” are “poverty and low incomes,” the report noted only “isolated reported cases of child slavery, [and] child trafficking,” the assessment of which would “need further research work of the qualitative community participation approach.”Footnote 22
Child trafficking affects all West Africa, but Ghanaian and subregional networks are part of continental networks.Footnote 23 Empirical data useful for Ghana may be regional or Africa-wide.Footnote 24 A number of bodies compile data for regional “plans of action.”Footnote 25 Africa-wide estimates often emanate from international bodies, such as the ILO, which claimed that forty percent of African children worked in 1998.Footnote 26 As Ghanaian trafficking is big business, vendors often operate hubs in Europe and the Americas, feeding into larger clandestine networks.Footnote 27
Many Ghanaian data sets emanate from the cocoa industry.Footnote 28 The industry contributes seventy percent of Ghana's foreign exchange, more than forty percent of government revenue, and twelve percent of GDP. Approximately two-thirds of children living in cocoa-growing regions work in cocoa production. While the precise number is unclear, seventy-one percent of adult farmers in one survey indicated that their biological children assisted. Unlike neighboring Côte d'Ivoire, the majority of laboring children (seventy-two percent) work on familial farms. Data are often interwoven with West African cocoa production; and because of the “sensationalism” of media reports, “there is a significant risk” of underreporting.Footnote 29
Adepoju observed that “no single research methodology can adequately capture” the issue's dimensions. In contrast to the child labor survey, data on trafficking remains inadequate, and the complexities of seasonal labor impede quantification.Footnote 30 Generally speaking, “the distinction between trafficking per se, especially with respect to children, and the long standing seasonal migration … across borders is blurred.”Footnote 31
Antecedent Child Advocacy in the Gold Coast and Ghana
The historical antecedents to contemporary child advocacy reside in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the formative phase of colonization. Coastal antislavery campaigns, emancipation of women and children from coercive peasant economies, child slave rescue activities of missionaries—these were the early stages in state and nonstate agency intervention that paved the way for more paternalistic and invasive child protection strategies during the mature phase of colonialism and through decolonization into independence. Although abolitionist policies extended toward the interior from the coast, the implementation of policies associated with adult slave emancipation reinscribed dependence on children. Child labor markets and debt peonage expanded during colonialism, particularly during the Depression and the Second World War. Postindependence declension of adoption, fosterage, and shared child-rearing created new opportunities for labor recruiters.
Trade and labor migration followed three logics in precolonial and colonial Ghana. Axes followed riverbanks, like the Volta. Kola, salt, gold, and human chattel were prominent from the fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries, only to be displaced by other commodities and luxuries as colonization intensified.Footnote 32 Land routes were equally important, transecting rivers and following ecotones: They crisscrossed east-west from Cameroun to Senegambia and paralleled coastal lagoons, a hundred miles inland, and the Sahel/Sahara.Footnote 33 Regional market cycles constituted a third logic.Footnote 34 Regular locals and itinerant traders in market towns bartered, hired, or sold children outright.Footnote 35
The “end of slavery” in the Gold Coast Colony, spanning the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, demonstrates the significance of age, familial relationships, and labor capacity.Footnote 36 The British governor declared free all children born after a particular date.Footnote 37 Germans in Togoland (one-third of which came under British control from 1914) passed prohibitions but enacted little enforcement.Footnote 38 The greatest irony of adult slavery's decline is that slavery-dependent peasant economies, like cocoa, were forced to expand familial and, thus, child labor.Footnote 39 Children were “more easily kidnapped, controlled, and acculturated,” and the trafficking of girls often surprised and confounded European powers.Footnote 40 As slavery declined and labor became “freer,” pawning evolved in tandem with shifting values and agricultural demands.Footnote 41
Pawnship, the loaning of an individual for credit or debt, is key to understanding the growth in Gold Coast labor trafficking. Because it was reframed during the early colonial period as a “traditional” practice “in the vague middle ground” between formal slavery and fluid “African institutions,” it became a site of expansion for unfree labor.Footnote 42 Toyin Falola and Paul Lovejoy identify an African ideology that viewed pawnship in juxtaposition to enslavement: In the “construction of kinship” of kin-based societies, “pawnship functioned as a mechanism for reallocating individuals as a means of acquiring capital or providing security for debt.” Pawning resurged as debt bondage during hardship and expanded with market forces.Footnote 43
Through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Europeans observed how traders concealed child slaves in slippery terms such as “pawn” or “bonded person”; some simply adopted children, thus disguising trafficking as “cultural placement.”Footnote 44 The British struggled to decipher “traditional” and “benign” practices from what they considered slavery. Whereas prior to formal colonialism, pawns helped individuals and groups raise credit, during colonialism children were pawned to pay taxes.Footnote 45 A pawn could be held for the length of a loan and the interest offset by working for a creditor or lineage. Pawns could be redeemed outright or (as was often the case with girls) married to their creditor whereby the bride-price (the cost of procuring a wife) canceled the debt. Perpetual servitude could stem from pawning for punishment, such as trokosi among the Ewe of the Volta Region.Footnote 46 Child kidnapping, “transfers” disguised as adoption or betrothal, and other forms of peonage proliferated.Footnote 47
Trade in and movement of children continued into the twentieth century.Footnote 48 In spite of wage labor expansion, Fred Cooper observes, Africans were not “workers” by European standards.Footnote 49 Forms of bondage and subjugation remained, and access to labor was a complicated nexus of “obligations” into which children and women rarely entered “freely.”Footnote 50 Slave concubines were important for lineage expansion. Freeing concubines and “wives” could result in disinheritance; among matrilineal Akan societies slavery was deployed as a patriarchal tool to circumvent the matriline. Emancipation of adult slaves led one parent to surrender ownership of children, and the resultant struggles served to entrench an inherent value in a child's labor and personhood. Kin-based tenure often tied ex-slaves and children to former masters; the alternative was destitution.Footnote 51
People moved through the Gold Coast and Togoland because obstructions like border administration or local opposition were limited. Indeed, Paul Nugent argues that political and economic circumstances provided incentives for movement.Footnote 52 While administrators rarely noted children as subjects of political power, family fosterage, or pawns in transactions, other communities, including missionaries and African intermediaries, observed the side effects of agricultural “intensification” of land and child labor market “contestation.”Footnote 53 What interwar colonial administrators were observing was the rearticulation of human trade in a region with a long history of people-trading.Footnote 54
Formal colonial rule cemented urban economic and political power in Accra, Kumasi, and Cape Coast.Footnote 55 Additional demands for household labor transformed former captives and fostered children from extended families into domestic servants.Footnote 56 African colonial soldiers recalibrated the socioeconomic imbalances created by emancipation by purchasing concubines and children.Footnote 57 Demobilized soldiers later returned to cities with women and children, many refugees, in tow.Footnote 58 Incentives to expand cash crops created labor urgency. Labor recruiting, an occupation strikingly similar to slave trading, became profitable. The first practitioners were Europeans, but Africans quickly enjoined this role.Footnote 59 Individuals and groups moved village to village, luring parents into informal arrangements—promising to find children work and to remunerate them regularly or to provide them with prosperity and educational opportunities.Footnote 60
The Depression had profound economic implications and deepened dependence on cheap, coerced labor.Footnote 61 With disruptions in cocoa production from 1930 onward, administrators looked inward to solve economic problems.Footnote 62 Neighboring colonies raised and expanded taxation.Footnote 63 The Gold Coast expanded agriculture and shifted the focus from capitalist exportable crops to local market-oriented production.Footnote 64 Each approach “called into question all existing policies” and drew greater numbers of children into colonial economies.Footnote 65 Austerity directly affected children by closing schools, orphanages, and other programs.Footnote 66 In Accra and Kumasi fostered and older children were forced to fend for themselves and were the first cast from homes; they worked as servants and petty traders.Footnote 67 Cities witnessed an explosion in homelessness, prostitution, and street-hawking.Footnote 68
Colonial development models in the 1940s and 1950s framed the path to independence in 1957 by failing to respond to the social and political crises of earlier economic deprivation.Footnote 69 Whereas colonial models posited scientific problems and rational solutions to complex issues such as urbanization, deforestation, and prostitution, the persistence of traditional forms of child fosterage and their corruption by economic conditions went unnoticed.Footnote 70 Also conspicuously absent from modernity's agenda was the growing dependence on children in sectors like fishing.Footnote 71 Child labor and markets were also absent from nation-building projects implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, like the expansion of cocoa and the Volta Dam.Footnote 72 Indeed, such projects expanded child labor and created new forms of labor migration.Footnote 73
Whereas international political developments from the 1970s to the 1990s significantly impeded campaigns to eradicate child labor in Africa generally, Ghana's political upheavals marginalized policy-making.Footnote 74 Cold War divisions and South African apartheid made consensus on what constituted child exploitation and legitimate child labor impossible.Footnote 75 The continued struggle against white supremacy overshadowed the rare interrogation of the growing dependency of the export-oriented economy on child laborers.Footnote 76
Concern about the embedded nature of child labor exploitation surfaced throughout West Africa after the Cold War.Footnote 77 Ghana's labor standards diminished, and the “burden” on children rose with the onset of neoliberal structural readjustment.Footnote 78 Universities expanded sociological inquiry into child development issues, such as street children and school delinquency.Footnote 79 Recent work focuses on transregional trends and the relationship between labor and migration beyond Ghana.Footnote 80 While the dimensions of trafficking remain difficult to articulate, research about and dependency on child labor are expanding.Footnote 81
Contemporary Child Advocacy and the “Crisis” in Child Trafficking
Child advocacy agencies operating independently or “as partners” with Ghana's government explore a spectrum of issues, including but not limited to domestic abuse, labor, fosterage, adoption, prostitution, and, more recently, enslavement and trafficking.Footnote 82 International, subregional, and domestic agencies operate throughout West Africa. Over two decades Ghana has become a regional hub for the increasingly regulated operations of the nongovernmental and intergovernmental humanitarian industry.Footnote 83
Three distinct currents of Ghanaian child advocacy help make sense of the shift toward a legislative remedy for trafficking. The first current, child labor advocacy, focuses on internal dynamics, such as regional paths of mobility and traditional and new labor demands.Footnote 84 Reports originating from national and international agencies are often microstudies and national surveys; policy recommendations and “best practices” are suggested in balanced language. The second, the industry self-regulation model, originated externally as a reaction to widespread public discomfort in response to revelations about child labor in the cocoa fields.Footnote 85 The third current, a focus on anti-trafficking, emerged in contrast to the first current, and a discourse of “crisis” is pervasive. The methodologies favored in trafficking reports lend themselves to macro trends and transnational analysis and feed a fear of Malthusian “crisis.”Footnote 86
From 1990 onward, African child advocacy revisited an insoluble and richly historical problem—the rights of children in developing economies—but with a new twist.Footnote 87 African regimes had publicly put aside disagreements with international child rights groups about child labor and ratified the 1989 UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. But they subsequently became embroiled in identifying the “worst forms” of child labor.Footnote 88 On the world stage, an uneasy truce brokered in 1989 between the conflicting ideologies of humanitarianism with respect to children's rights dissolved during a ten-year debate on the relative exploitation and permissibility of child labor.Footnote 89
In Ghana, tensions reemerged as the ink dried on the 1989 convention.Footnote 90 Apprehensions about the ratification of children's rights are partly reflected in the earlier African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (Banjul Charter), a complex document authored (c. 1979–1981) by a committee of the now-defunct Organisation of African Unity (OAU) that struggled to balance individual and collective rights in a decolonizing context.Footnote 91 One expression of (adult) African discomfort with the newly enshrined rights came from the cultural relativist and Afrocentric Ghanaian scholar Josiah Cobbah.
The post-independence liberal state in Africa has not been flexible enough to accommodate the cultural nuances of Africans. African state constitutions have been everything but African. Fundamentally they have followed a natural right-individual rights approach, implicitly based on an expectation of a political transformation of Africans into Europeans.Footnote 92
But the Banjul Charter was not an aberration in African thinking. Indeed, the OAU waded further into contested terrain, producing in 1999 its own regional children's rights charter, although Ghana has yet to ratify this.Footnote 93
The reconceptualization of child labor into “worst forms” and, by implication, its division into intolerable and tolerable forms, have been interpreted as reflecting a division between moralistic and socialization models.Footnote 94 As Gavin Hilson explains, the first model “is rooted in the moral belief that the welfare of all children should be preserved, and depicts any attempt to exploit children for economic gain as ‘robbing’ them of their youth and education.”Footnote 95 This model prevailed until 1990. The second, by contrast, “does not see child labor as intrinsically ‘bad’ per se but rather” part of African “tradition.”Footnote 96 It rejects the rigid Western division between childhood and adulthood and hints at “how developed countries, with their superior political and economic power, unjustly dominate the international discourse on child labor.”Footnote 97 This second model adopts relativist and anti-imperial rhetoric. In so doing, it paved the way for the idealization of distinctly legitimate and illegitimate child economic activity and, by default, the formulation of narrower, goal-oriented campaigns, leaving intact newly legitimated forms. This idealization, according to economists Christiaan Grootaert and Ravi Kanbur, provides for the addressing of child labor by the “two pillars” of “legislation and economic incentives.”Footnote 98
It is within this context that the expansive humanitarian attention to child labor and trafficking ought to be considered. Many agencies worked to ameliorate Ghanaian children's lives and expand, in Makau Mutua's words, the “promise of liberalism.”Footnote 99 But they operated in a less than sympathetic context where neoliberal rights-focused rhetoric coupled with economic goal-driven approaches often prevailed.Footnote 100 The industry regulation model emerging from cocoa production represents one example whereby Africans could “avail themselves” of international protective instruments.Footnote 101 In so doing, the “two pillars”—coercion and incentive—formed a framework legitimizing particular modalities of child labor.
The displacement of child labor by trafficking on the international humanitarian agenda circa 2000 perhaps appears dramatic and sudden. For example, the 1997 annual UNICEF report refers to trafficking only three times—and only in connection with prostitution.Footnote 102 While the Convention on the Rights of the Child sparked “a revolutionary shift in the world's approach to children,” the expansive agenda of international agencies such as UNICEF, the ILO, the World Bank, and the UN Children's Fund reflected a comprehensive solution that filtered out to NGOs.Footnote 103 The decline in child labor activism and the rise in trafficking activity are thus embedded in a dynamic process whereby illegitimate was distinguished from legitimate labor as part of a model combating poverty and underdevelopment.Footnote 104 And with the rise in public concern about trafficking, legitimation was enhanced by the neoliberal agenda of neo-abolitionist legislative remedy.
Child Labor-Focused Agencies
Child labor and migration for work garnered significant attention in the 1990s, as newly democratic Ghana demonstrated its commitment to the 1989 convention's objectives. The foci of child labor agencies reflect engagement with the convention's broader economic and social development interests. The language employed by agencies is often cautious and measured. The labor of children is routinely described as a “problem,” following the ILO's International Programme for the Eradication of Child Labour (IPEC).Footnote 105 And child labor migration is characterized as a problem ongoing “for decades.”Footnote 106 Child labor agencies are interested in long-term improvement of living standards and “the specific goal of eliminat[ing] the worst forms of child labor.”Footnote 107 But two contentious topics—the appropriate amount of labor for children and the child/parent decision-making nexus—often result in a spectrum of opinions.Footnote 108
Early work on child labor originated in the academy, including the University of Ghana's Center for Social Policy Studies.Footnote 109 Sociologists examining labor migration built on urban research conducted in the first decades of independence concerning changes in the rearing and parenting of Ghanaian children.Footnote 110 Much child labor activism is conducted by domestic NGOs, many of which were founded in the 1990s, after Ghana's adoption of the 1989 convention. NGOs, like Catholic Action for Street Children, the Street Children's Home, Community Action for Development, and the Estrak Foundation, operate independently but also coordinate activities via the Ghana NGO Coalition on the Rights of the Child.Footnote 111 While individually they may meet specific goals, child labor-focused agencies have diverse, competing, and sometimes conflicting interventions.
When international agencies intervene in Ghana's child labor debate, they often reinscribe a normative discourse of historically appropriate activities and tie child labor to intractable problems like poverty.Footnote 112 An ILO report opened its discussion of exploitative labor:
Within the Ghanaian context, children are expected to work for the family doing menial household chores such as sweeping, fetching water, carrying firewood, preparing meals, washing dishes and taking care of younger siblings. This is not only considered to be acceptable but is seen more importantly as an integral part of the socialization of children in order for them to become responsible and hard-working members of society. … From a historical perspective, child work is part and parcel of the fabric of Ghanaian society. Children are viewed as an investment, with the legitimate expectation that they will contribute to the family income and look after their parents in their retirement.Footnote 113
Other labor projects focused on concomitant factors, such as the inadequacies of education or the prevalence of youth employment, but ignored the implication of the nature of exploitative child and youth labor for undereducation.Footnote 114
Child labor-focused agencies may circumvent difficulties in disseminating their message by establishing relationships with international agencies (such as ActionAid, Danida, CARE, Planned Parenthood, and World Vision) or by using local radio (such as Curious Minds).Footnote 115 Agencies working broadly for child well-being frequently employ inward-looking and sentimental language; they garner less attention and are cited less often for empirical data and conceptual frameworks.Footnote 116 Organizations and researchers wrestle with how to portray child fosterage and family labor and feature unreliable informants.Footnote 117 Organizations like the Association of People for Practical Life Education (APPLE) employ colloquial and nonscholarly adaptations of humanitarian jargon.Footnote 118 Other organizations deploy an ethnicized operational framework, such as the Ashanti Youth Development Foundation.
Surveys of labor and migration produce unexpected results, such as one project that questioned hypotheses that only impoverished families send children away.Footnote 119 Such results throw into doubt many of the embedded assumptions about the relationship between poverty and child labor.Footnote 120 While the ILO enjoined domestic statistics agencies to conduct child labor surveys, few countries have the necessary infrastructure. In some cases, the detailed results are never released, leading to questioning of “the validity of the data.”Footnote 121 When child trafficking is discussed, it is often a precursor to child labor networks and within the context of poverty and the difficulties encountered by parents of large families.Footnote 122
In summary, child labor agencies documenting the forms and context of exploitative labor explored rural poverty, migration, family-rearing and fosterage, homelessness, unemployment, gang formation, and a particular predicament referred to regionally as “streetism.”Footnote 123 With the move toward “worst forms” rhetoric, however, agencies turned afresh to child prostitution, mining, and cocoa. As groups curtailed their programmatic operations to “illegitimate” forms of child labor, they inadvertently furnished a narrow legislative remedy for trafficking.
The Emergence of the Industry-Regulation Model
After the adoption of “worst forms” protocol, many agencies shifted resources to narrower projects with specific outcomes. Cocoa garnered public attention because concerns about chocolate morphed into a realization that the goals of international conventions pertaining to children's rights had yet to be realized in the African agricultural sector.Footnote 124 Research in the 1990s underscored the centrality of child labor to Ghanaian cocoa farming and the role of cocoa in wider West African migration. Cocoa presented a manageable and homogeneous research site with opportunities for comparing and contrasting national systems, and in this context an industry-regulation model emerged.Footnote 125
In collaboration with Ghanaian NGOs and research institutes, the International Initiative to End Child Labor explored the prevalence of younger children on cocoa farms and the impact on physical health.Footnote 126 Diane Mull and Steven Kirkhorn observed that children between the ages of five and nine represented the largest group, and the biggest danger they faced was pesticide. The use of children, particularly for dangerous practices, was “a consequence of poverty and economic decline.” A generalized desire to improve “empirical understanding” and “facilitate more nuanced debate” about child labor was coupled to improvements in “the living conditions of working children in the short term [sic] and the eradication of child labor in the long-term.”Footnote 127
A solution to exploitative labor emerged in the form of a collaborative monitoring program between researchers and business.Footnote 128 The initiative gained momentum with the passage of the US Harkin-Engel Protocol (2001).Footnote 129 Industry groups, including the Chocolate Manufacturers' Association (CMA) and National Confectioners Association (NCA), would finance and operate an industry regulatory process, including the development of a voluntary “certification” system for farming to develop and implement standards certifying cocoa was produced without the “worst forms of child labor” (as defined by ILO Convention 182). For the NCA, “[c]ertification for cocoa farming is an ongoing program that will drive positive change in cocoa communities with a focus on responsible labor practices.” A steering body, the International Cocoa Initiative, coordinated pilot projects.Footnote 130
Mirrored by similar “watchdog” programs, cocoa-monitoring embraced the scholarly distinction between “moralistic” and “socialization” models.Footnote 131 Indeed, the CMA situates its agricultural labor scheme within this dichotomy. The website of the CMA offers the following explanation:
Abusive child labor is completely unacceptable. At the same time, in many West African cultures children play an important role in helping out on the family farm. The cocoa industry and its partners are working hard to balance international labor standards and local cultural traditions.Footnote 132
Since its inception, the process has been embroiled in controversy. NGOs criticize its inaction and inadequacies.Footnote 133 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to assess the protocol's impact, scholars and activists acknowledge the industry-regulation model's success at deflecting criticism.Footnote 134 Moreover, the narrow legal framework offered a valuable lesson to child advocacy agencies.
Child Trafficking-Focused Agencies
In contrast with child labor, anti-trafficking programs are more coordinated and sophisticated.Footnote 135 Building on lessons learned from cocoa regulation, the goals espoused since anti-trafficking initiatives became preponderant in the early 2000s are narrower and legalistic.Footnote 136 Unlike the divergent child labor attitudes, agencies focusing on trafficking operated from 2000 under the precise international definitions of trafficking (the so-called Palermo Protocols).Footnote 137 This precision enabled NGOs to disseminate a coherent message resonating with a shared audience.
Trafficking-focused agencies connect with their audience through a variety of emotional mechanisms. The most common method, resonating with nineteenth-century missionary newsletters, is the deployment of personal child testimony.Footnote 138 Stories may highlight the consumer products exchanged for labor. Statistics, maps, and personal narratives feature prominently in materials produced by domestic, subregional, and international anti-trafficking agencies.Footnote 139 The tone adopted by many organizations is intentionally alarmist; resonating with Ghanaian media stories, reports routinely frame the traffic as a “scandal” or “crisis” that appeared suddenly.Footnote 140 Agencies often observe that trafficking has reached epidemic proportions, rhetoric which demands urgent remedy; epidemiological metaphors situate trafficking within the context of other maladies, such as poverty, malnutrition, and illiteracy.Footnote 141 Sensational reports of modern-day “slave ships”—such as the infamous Nigeria-registered MV Etireno, which docked in Cotonou, Benin, with several hundred children aboard in 2001—offer opportunities to drive home a sense of urgency.Footnote 142 Domestic NGOs such as the Parent and Child Foundation (founded in 2005), the Rescue Foundation (ca. 2004), and the Ark Foundation use the Internet to disseminate their message.Footnote 143
Children are routinely portrayed as victims.Footnote 144 Parents are often unwilling accomplices. These tropes prevail in spite of evidence suggesting a more complex picture.Footnote 145 Reports whitewash complexity, such as the relationship between school fees and work. Rather than embrace multifaceted and conflicting motivations, reports reinforce the idea that the “overriding cause of child trafficking” is an ongoing “crisis” forcing parents to relinquish their children.Footnote 146 This general framework is situated within a popular view that an economic crisis has gripped West Africa for several decades, a crisis resulting in the corruption of traditional forms of child fosterage.Footnote 147 NGOs develop close relationships with news agencies contributing to the rapid circulation of a developing story.Footnote 148 Western media played a large role in the “discoveries” of “slave ships” loaded with child slave cargoes.Footnote 149 Some media attempt a more balanced account of the causes and effects of trafficking, but more often than not the operative paradigms (and press releases) of NGOs frame articles.Footnote 150
Statistics are deployed for dramatic effect, but often with little information about methodological approaches or research. Many are of dubious scholarly value.Footnote 151 The Global March Against Child Labour publishes “fact sheets” on several West African countries, including Ghana, with simple statistical claims in one column and sources in another.Footnote 152 The International Organization for Migration produces data more attendant to scholarly norms, but it has limited resources in West Africa.Footnote 153 More often than not, however, the source of many statistics is simply impossible to locate.
As Ghana is a regional command center for humanitarian work, international anti-trafficking organizations deploy resources on a West African basis. Some, such as Plan International and Save the Children, operate hierarchically and remotely.Footnote 154 Some, such as Anti-Slavery International (ASI), propose regionwide projects with multinational NGO cooperations.Footnote 155 Terre des Hommes deploys regional and subregional directors to oversee domestic and regional projects.Footnote 156 Others coordinate networks of domestic researchers and finance the teamwork of local activists through jointly funded grants.Footnote 157 Reports and maps highlight transnational and subregional movements and those from rural hinterlands to major urban hubs, in order to emphasize the need for a supranational solution.Footnote 158
Leading IGOs, such as the ILO, UNICEF, and UNESCO, funded national studies to support the development of a comprehensive regional picture.Footnote 159 The ILO's IPEC synthesized domestic reports to account for macro regional trends.Footnote 160 NGOs, such as ASI, provide important guidance to domestic NGOs interested in grant writing, as they negotiate the language distinguishing projects on trafficking from projects on labor. Regionwide programs also provide the empirical data to establish regional trafficking dynamics, thus reifying the value of multilateral, externally funded projects.Footnote 161 Bilateral and multilateral research projects, like those supported by ASI, reinforce the sense that trafficking is subregional, requiring a coordinated legislative solution.Footnote 162
These aspects collectively underscore the urgency, “imperative,” and goal-driven discourse of child trafficking advocacy.Footnote 163 Both the language of reports and their proliferation during a brief period point to the narrow agenda of trafficking agencies. While child labor advocates reported on broad trends and lobbied for general policy changes, trafficking groups are intensely focused on domestic prohibitions on trafficking. Like the British antislavery lobby prior to 1807, contemporary abolitionist agencies view the inadequate legal apparatus as a chief impediment to combating traffic in children.Footnote 164 And this close relationship between their agendas and the law is the subject of the next section.
Anti-Trafficking Between Paradigm and Remedy
A number of legislative paradigms emerged as the consensus for legislative remedy prevailed. Legislative paradigms were fashioned by international instruments and national iterations of international protocols and conventions.Footnote 165 These legislative remedies can be divided into three typologies: a blanket approach incorporating diverse forms of “human trafficking” such as Ghana's; child-centric laws focused exclusively on the child dimensions of trafficking; and legislative revalidation, whereby existing remedies were valorized.
Legislative Remedy Paradigms
Since the late 1990s, anti-trafficking agencies have implored West African republics to take legislative action to combat trafficking, and the US State Department took up the call in 1998. Legislative action involved three dimensions: ratification of international treaties, conventions, and protocols; creation of regional conventions; and passage and enforcement of national laws. While the US Department of State's annual ranking of states operates as a powerful incentive for legislative action, the “aggressive enforcement efforts” by the US and its “global partners” are only part of the picture.Footnote 166 With their relentless emphasis on immediate and urgent action and voluminous documentation of the “crisis,” anti-trafficking agencies played a central role in legislative change. They also attempted to carve out a future for themselves.
If my earlier account of the move from a focus on child labor toward one on trafficking appears unsatisfactory, the shift is made more comprehensible when we consider developments in the United States, especially the creation of the OMCTP, and the publication of annual reports from 2001. From this date onward, trafficking began to be reframed as an issue of domestic legitimacy, and West African regimes were pressured to deliver results and “establish law and order within their own borders.”Footnote 167 The positivistic legal framework lends itself to legislative remedy and sits uncomfortably with broad social activism undergirding child labor campaigns.
Anti-trafficking agencies promoted three legislative paradigms: international normative frameworks, regional conventions, and domestic reform. Human Rights Watch (HRW) specifically identified Ghana as among the nations most “implicated in the trafficking of children.” It demanded the immediate ratification of the Palermo Protocols and called for a domestic prohibition on child trafficking as well as the investigation, prosecution, and punishment of perpetrators. To this end, it endorsed the enactment of domestic anticorruption laws consistent with UN conventions. It also recommended the “establish[ment of] a regional anti-trafficking convention, ensuring that any convention incorporates full protection of the human rights of trafficked children.”Footnote 168
Other agencies mirrored HRW's appeals. The ILO observed the “absence of specific legislation on trafficking in children for labour exploitation” and called for the adaptation of “national legislation to international standards” and acceleration of “the ratification process.”Footnote 169 Plan International called for countries “to make the changes necessary in legal frameworks and policies to ensure child protection at all levels.”Footnote 170 UNICEF observed that “[i]n the absence of comprehensive legislation specifically dealing with trafficking,” African countries “tackle” the problem by de facto means.Footnote 171 Innocenti Insight and UNICEF specifically called for a program of “major legislative instruments.” ASI shied away from endorsing a normative legislative framework. While it applauded the incorporation of conventions and protocols, it called for “harmonization” of trafficking laws and a “code of conduct” for legislative reform.Footnote 172
Anti-trafficking agencies attempted to construct a role in future initiatives. HRW recommended that regional anti-trafficking include “qualified representatives from NGOs and civil society in all regional negotiations.”Footnote 173 ASI called for partnership between NGOs and governments, with a focus on the rehabilitation of rescued trafficked children.Footnote 174 Terre des Hommes imagined a more expansive and intrusive role, including civil society collaborations and national action plans.Footnote 175
Legislative Remedy Typologies
By 2009 all West African nations presented one form of legislative remedy for trafficking. They fall into three categories. In the first group exist laws, like Ghana's, establishing a wide legislative tool to encompass all forms of trafficking, including that of adults and stolen organs. In the second group, laws, like Togo's, focus on child trafficking exclusively. In the third are countries like Mali, which combat trafficking through existing legislation and/or enhancements. The laws that emerged in West Africa in the wake of anti-trafficking campaigns have important similarities. Evidence suggests, however, that legislative approaches fail to account for the flexibility and elasticity of child labor trafficking networks.Footnote 176
The first legislative model, the “blanket” approach, situates child trafficking within wider clandestine networks of human trafficking.Footnote 177 Ghana's Human Trafficking Act (Act 694) of 2005 is representative of this model. Human trafficking is defined as
the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, trading or receipt of persons within and across national borders by (a) the use of threats, force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud or deception, the abuse of power or exploitation of vulnerability, or (b) giving or receiving payments and benefits to achieve consent.Footnote 178
Exploitation is explained as including “at the minimum, induced prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery and practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.” Trafficking includes “placement for sale, bonded placement, placement as service where exploitation by someone else is the motivating factor.” Furthermore, in trafficking cases, “the consent of the child, parents or guardian … cannot be used as a defense,” irrespective of whether or not “there is evidence of an abuse of power, fraud or deception,” or whether the “vulnerability of the child was taken advantage of.” This expansive jurisprudence criminalizes a spectrum of intermediaries as “accessories.”Footnote 179
The “blanket” approach—also embodied in Nigeria (2003), Sierra Leone (2005), Liberia (2005), Senegal (2005), and, more recently, Gambia (2007), Burkina Faso (2008), and Mauretania (2009)—has produced some surprising results. On the one hand, it groups together all forms of trafficking—child, adult, and other—for prosecutorial attention and thus streamlines resources. On the other hand, the defocus from children means that inconsistencies emerge in domestic spheres.Footnote 180 Furthermore, states with “blanket” approaches devote significant enforcement support to aspects, such as prostitution, that are underrepresented in the child victim pool and in compliance with foreign governmental initiatives with respect to the repatriation of smuggled “illegal” migrants.Footnote 181
The other typologies are examined in more detail elsewhere.Footnote 182 For the purpose of this article, I will make several brief observations. The second model, a “child-centric” law, prevails in many francophone nations, and the law defines trafficking in children by focusing on age, the process of movement or displacement, and the type of exploitation. This approach delinks child and adult trafficking networks with several consequences. Each state in the “child-centric” group reported investigations and prosecutions by 2009. The third legislative model and smallest group, one of “revalorization,” asserts that existing laws provide adequate remedy. Because of this underlying assertion, no one state's laws are emblematic. Member countries simultaneously reported investigations and prosecutions in 2009 and promulgated new laws.
The three typologies of legislative remedy are problematic with respect to enforcement. With respect to the “blanket” approach, almost immediately upon passage of the new law Ghana began drafting amendments.Footnote 183 Prosecutors complained that poorly written definitions did not provide the leverage to guarantee convictions.Footnote 184 The second “child-centric” approach is revealed to be a highly transitory stage. The contradictory operations of the third group encapsulate its inefficacy. It comprises states that both insist current law is satisfactory, and simultaneously draft new laws on child or human trafficking.
Conclusion: The Limited Efficacy of Anti-Trafficking Legislation
In light of the immediate amendment of Ghana's law and news reports of continued failures at enforcement, it is worth considering whether the legislative agenda of humanitarianism achieved or obfuscated the objectives of the myriad child advocacy constituencies. I am reminded of Sally Engle Merry's observation that “for human rights ideas to be effective, they need to be translated into local terms and situated with local contexts of power and meaning.”Footnote 185 The operationalization of what she calls “human rights in the vernacular” resides in the hands of “intermediaries.” Merry's interrogation of the activities of NGOs on the ground reveals important “conundrums.” She argues that the human rights system challenges states' authority over their citizens at the same time as it reinforces states' power. It enables critiques of the state, but remedy comes in the form of state-sponsored solutions. It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that in response to Ghana's 2009 demotion to the Tier Two Watch List, the Ministry for Women's and Children's Affairs inaugurated the National Human Trafficking Database in February 2010—composed of seventeen members, including representatives from NGOs.Footnote 186
The tensions Merry describes have been both productive and counterproductive in terms of Ghanaian child protection. The legislative agenda moved through the republic's assembly with few of the obstacles encountered by other acts of social engineering.Footnote 187 But the resulting law delinked the newly criminalized aspects of child trafficking from both the demand for and forms of child labor in the country and subregion, reflecting a neoliberal turn on “traditional” African parental ideologies with regard to proprietary claims in the persons and labor of children.
By the late 2000s, Ghana was among the majority of West African republics to have passed new legislation to combat and outlaw trafficking in children.Footnote 188 These individual laws were the culmination of years of research and lobbying by domestic and international child rights advocates, legislators, and legal activists. The laws built on national children's rights acts by criminalizing specific practices associated with the illegal labor and movement of children.Footnote 189 Ghana embraced anti-trafficking law swiftly, but it would be too simplistic to interpret this as another manifestation of US imperialism and moral panic.Footnote 190 While the USAID supports legislative drafting in Ghana and disseminates a draft anti-trafficking statute, domestic authors, such as Ghana's Estelle Appiah, drew on a rich history and a variety of sources for inspiration.Footnote 191
The passage of Ghana's law is more comprehensible when we distinguish between the agendas of the diverse child advocacy constituencies. Only by reading the documentary evidence is the fuller extent of the tension between child advocacy sectors revealed. Within the child advocacy community attitudes vary with regard to at what age children should work, what forms of work are acceptable or exploitative, and how to deal with parental involvement.Footnote 192 Tensions surfaced with regard to the necessity for new law. Trafficking agencies masked the complexity of child labor for which trafficking networks accumulate children because this complexity detracted from the legislative goal. And they pursued this concrete and achievable goal as part of a regionwide movement.
Child labor advocacy played a role in the 1990s in establishing the context for understanding trafficking. But narrowly focused campaigns, such as those that led to the creation of a cocoa-monitoring agency to lessen the dependence of the industry on child labor, demonstrated the value of achievable goals and validated particular forms of labor. Anti-trafficking activity subsequently eclipsed child labor campaigns partly by directing attention at a specific objective, namely a legislative response. This narrow agenda—amplified by a discourse of crisis and urgency—produced a specific, albeit flawed, legislative instrument.
