EDITOR’S NOTE: Dear Readers, the below includes the introduction and the first two posts in a series we are featuring over the coming weeks on trafficking, human smuggling, and forced labor. Along with pieces from Ruby P. Andrew, Benjamin N. Lawrance, and Richard L. Roberts, upcoming posts will include commentaries from Margaret Akullo, Joel Quirk, Jody Sarich and Kevin Bales, and Oludayo Tade.
Introduction: “Trafficking, Smuggling and Child Adoption in Africa”
Benjamin N. Lawrance
During a recent research trip to Sierra Leone to attend a conference on Sierra Leonean history, participants, including myself, could not but help notice that the local new stations were captivated by new claims that the Help A Needy Child International Center, known as HANCI, had fraudulently removed children from their parents during the country’s recent civil war. Parents of over twenty children have now come forward to claim that their children were removed from their control under false pretenses in the context of conflict. They want their children back and they want to know where they are.
The Associated Press reported on May 8, 2012, that, “in a statement read by coordinator Abu Bakarr Kargbo, the parents of the 29 children also called on the police and government to look into whether more children were adopted without proper consent. Sierra Leone’s government on April 13 mandated police to reopen an investigation into the 1997 adoptions of children placed at the Help A Needy Child International center, known as HANCI, during the country’s brutal civil war.”
Since the complaints surfaced, HANCI contacted the Maine-based adoption agency, Maine Adoption Placement Service (MAPS), which sponsored the child placements. The agency reported that U.S. families had adopted 29 of 33 children. Both HANCI and MAPS continue to insist that “informed consent” was attained from all parents of adopted children.
The recent child adoption scandal in Sierra Leone echoes an earlier incident of child abduction by the French NGO, Arche de Zoé, in Chad. On 30 October 2007, the government of Chad formally charged six members of the charity for child abduction. Despite the group’s claim that the children were orphans from Darfur to be fostered in France, most of the 103 children have been found to be Chadian, and to have at least one living parent or guardian. Three journalists, seven Spanish Girjet flight crew, four Chadian and Sudanese nationals, including two Chadian officials, were also charged for complicity. Allegedly, some parents were convinced to surrender their children with promises of schooling, while some children were offered sweets and biscuits to leave home. To demonstrate the authenticity of the war orphan claim, aid workers applied fake blood and bandages to the children.
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy successfully negotiated the dropping of charges and release of the journalists and flight crew prior to trial. Six members of the NGO were convicted on 26 December 2007 and sentenced to eight years of forced labor, although they served just five months in France, which has no forced labor in its penal system, under an accord between Chad and France. The six were released in March 2008 but have been ordered to pay each of the 103 victims restitution equal to approximately $87,000 per defendant. The founder of Arche de Zoé, Eric Breteau, was among the six.
These two cases, and others like it from Benin and Nigeria, have thrust the issues of child adoption, smuggling, and trafficking once again into the foreground. The context of war and conflict ties together the stories from Sierra Leone and Chad. In both cases, Western organizations stand accused of removing children from their natal family situations under false pretenses. Child placement is one form of bonding and enslavement with a rich and complicated history and present in Africa.
With this pressing issue in mind, I have invited scholars working on trafficking issues from a variety of disciplinary and advocacy positions around the word to reflect on their current research on trafficking, human smuggling, and forced labor, to help readers of the blog make sense of these complex issues. What follows are a series of postings from scholars and practitioners working on trafficking. They differ in their analyses and specific areas of focus. But they are united in their concern for interrogating the complexity of trafficking practices and networks in Africa, past and present, with a view to aiding the prosecution of contemporary traffickers and the eradication of trafficking networks.
Benjamin N. Lawrance, Ph.D., is the Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology.
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Part 1: “A ‘Neo-Abolitionist Trend’ in Sub-Saharan Africa?”
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Ruby P. Andrew
In the decade since the US Department of State (USDOS) instituted the production of its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, anti-trafficking measures have been passed across the globe, and the US role in setting standards and paradigms for anti-trafficking has been extensively analyzed and criticized. Through its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (OMCTP), the USDOS’ three-tier categorization of nations’ trafficking measures continues to play a pivotal role in shaming recalcitrant nations into responding to accusations of trafficking within and across their respective borders.
No region has experienced so dramatic a transformation with respect to the USDOS agenda of “prevention, protection, and prosecution” than sub-Saharan Africa. No sub-Saharan African nation had an anti-trafficking statute at the start of the millennium. Over the course of the decade, the USDOS annually updated data on legislative responses and upbraided individual nations. By 2011, the supermajority of African nations had enacted new legislation to respond to the growing concern with trafficking in persons.
Yet comparatively little research has examined the regional dimensions of this new legislative experiment and the shape it is taking. Although some reports present data regionally, scant research has attempted to assess the effectiveness of anti-trafficking legislation in developing nations on a regional basis. More commonly, data is presented nation-by-nation, and analysis is generally restricted to the domestic context.
After examining the forms and content of the laws using examples from a broad spectrum of countries, we have observed that three forms of legislative response to trafficking appear to be underway in sub-Saharan Africa. The first is a broad or “blanket” human trafficking model. The second consists of a “child-centric” legislative model. And the third model comprises countries that enhance or “revalidate” existing domestic legislation and criminal codes.
The first group comprises states deploying laws on human trafficking interpreted in the broadest sense, which generically appear to meet evolving international minimum standards. The second group comprises states where laws prohibit only trafficking of minors, although the laws may accompany differing prohibitions depending on the relationship between trafficker and trafficked. The third group comprises states that appear to be resisting the current vogue for new law. They respond in a variety of ways, including amending criminal codes and labor laws, with the inference that current domestic legislative apparatuses provide sufficient protections for victims and scope for the prosecution of perpetrators.
Go here for further discussion of these legislative responses.
Benjamin N. Lawrance, Ph.D., is the Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ruby P. Andrew is an Associate Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center.
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Part 2: “Historicizing Contemporary Trafficking of Women and Children in Africa”
Richard L. Roberts and Benjamin N. Lawrance
The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 and the subsequent unraveling of the Soviet Union catapulted the problem of trafficking in women onto the world stage as impoverished eastern European women were duped by recruiters into the sex trade and trafficked to Western Europe and throughout the world. But trafficking in women and children has a much longer history and Eastern Europe was only one part of a much bigger and messier worldwide process of the exploitation of women and children.
Africa is a central part of this story, but one that has not equally captured the world’s attention. Trafficking in women and children is linked to the history of Africa’s involvement in the global trade in slaves. But it persists because of demand for unfree women and children both in Africa and abroad. Women and children are trafficked for the sex trade, but also for a host of other domestic, agricultural, and commercial purposes.
In September 2001 a group of sixty-eight children, aged between eighteen months and eighteen years, were rescued from a floundering ship off the coast of Cameroon and returned to Togo. In April of the same year, a larger group of children from several West African countries were rescued from a vessel off the Nigerian coast and brought to the headquarters of the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Cotonou, Benin. Scholars and activists can point to numerous incidents involving trafficking children almost every year over the past two decades.
While various UNICEF and International Labor Organization (ILO) reports have previously estimated that as many as 200,000 West African children may be bought and sold by professional dealers each year, there is very little reliable data.[i] Trafficking in women and children affects all countries in Africa. Indeed trafficking in Africa has become such big business that vendors often operate hubs in Europe, North America, and South East Asia and feed their human cargo into a much larger international network for trafficking women and children.
A 2006 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that “the market for smuggling human beings from Africa to Europe in … transfer fees alone could be on the order of $300 million each year.” Gail Wannenberg of the South African Institute of International Affairs views human trafficking as the second most lucrative form of organized crime in sub-Saharan Africa, after narcotics.
The formal end of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children. Slavery and the many forms of bondage, coercion, and subordination that have operated in Africa in the past are often juxtaposed with the nature of trafficking once slavery and the slave trade were made illegal.
Contemporary traffic in women is increasingly conflated with prostitution; and descriptions of child trafficking often merge with critiques of child labor practices. Human trafficking is rapidly emerging as a core human rights issue for the twenty-first century. Scholars, human rights activists, and criminologists need to be mindful of the long history of trafficking in order to better assess and confront its contemporary forms.
Fundamental to making sense of the upsurge in anti-trafficking programs are the connections between the legacies of colonial conquest, the legal systems that undergirded domination, and the development of international, regional, and domestic legal instruments to address the persistence of trafficking in women and children. Different modes of trafficking subordinate women and/or children (both boys and girls). Both formal and informal legal regimes and weak states contribute to human trafficking in Africa.
Also important are international legal conventions on trafficking – dating from interwar period of the League of Nations and the ILO, but continuing in the present day with the United Nations, United States Department of State (USDOS), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and UNICEF among others.
The incidents of 2001 highlighted above are frequently characterized as part of a broader “humanitarian crisis” gripping sub-Saharan Africa. But they are also part of a set of deeper historical processes throughout Africa. Crafty businessmen have not suddenly turned to trafficking in women and children, but rather the trade itself is built on antecedents reaching deep into the pre-colonial and colonial periods that created a dependency on household, child labor, and coercion.
A number of types of trafficking have been identified in Africa ranging from abduction, placement for sale, transfers of pawns, forced marriages, and bonded placement, to kidnapping of children to become soldiers, and sex slaves for armed conflicts. Yet, it is important to distinguish between the traffic in children and women and what has been referred to variously as “cultural placement” (i.e. the placement of subordinates with family members in better social and economic standing and marriages). The enslavement of children and women has deep historical roots in and beyond Africa.
Understanding the historical context undergirding the structure and currents in the contemporary traffic of women and children in Africa is central to making sense of anti-trafficking programs. Any substantive analysis of trafficking in dependent laborers – women and children in particular – into economic conditions not of their choosing must be situated within a wider understanding of slavery, the transformations in and decline of slavery, the rise of pawnship and bonding of women and children, and the deeper economic transformations wrought by expanding colonialism and globalization. Indeed, economic transformations during the twentieth century, including the growth of industrial production, actually increased the demand for coerced labor.
Join us as we continue this discussion.
Richard L. Roberts is Director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.
Benjamin N. Lawrance, Ph.D., is the Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology.
[i] The estimate of 200,000 has been widely circulated in news media and is partly based on an unpublished report by D.Verbeet, entitled “Combating the trafficking in children for labour exploitation in West and Central Africa, Synthesis report, ILO/IPEC, Abidjan, July 2000.”
The new TIP report from the US State Department is out.
http://news.yahoo.com/27-million-people-living-slavery-us-070112851.html
Check out the “victims’ stories” page.
http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2012/192360.htm