NGOs: gladiators of freedom Legal instruments The price of exploitation Children in chains Louise Corradini , UNESCO Courier journalist Symbols of exploitation: the hands of a young boy employed in a Colombian brick-making factory. Legal instruments Convention C182, known as “the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention,” was adopted in 1999 by the ILO. This applies to “all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.” The “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime” defines trafficking in persons as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include. . . the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.” Both documents define a child as a person under 18. At the start of the new millennium, the trafficking and exploitation of children is one of the world’s greatest scandals, enslaving around 100 million youngsters. Getting the upper hand on it means attacking the root causes of poverty and boosting law enforcement In 1997, police in New York discovered a network of 55 deaf-mute children selling key-rings in the city’s subway system. The Jackson Heights Deaf-Mutes, as the press called them, had been brought from Mexico by a gang specializing in selling defenceless children into slavery. At the end of an 18-hour day, they were expected to bring their bosses $100. Paid nothing, they were subjected to violent physical abuse. This episode revealed that child slavery was indeed taking place in the heart of Western civilization. According to U.S. government estimates, between 700,000 and two million women and children are sucked into this illegal trade every year worldwide. When the youngsters arrive in a foreign country, far away from their families, they are at the mercy of their employers. Isolated, they are put to work in plantations, factories, construction sites or domestic service. Or else they are forced to beg or become child prostitutes. Often confined in their workplaces, they toil in hazardous conditions. In short, they are treated as slaves. The stories of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Edmundo d’Amicis about exploitation of children in the 19th century are comparable to what child slaves have to endure at the dawn of the new millennium. The phenomenon cannot be separated from the much broader reality of child labour. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reckoned in 1995 that 73 million children under the age of 10 were “economically active” worldwide. On this ground, new forms of exploitation have developed. Due to the illegal nature of child slavery and trafficking, it is extremely difficult to collect data on its extent, but several recent studies give some idea of the sheer magnitude of the problem. Staggering figures • Every year, around 200,000 women and children are victims of the trade in Southeast Asia, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Trafficked children are being forced into sweatshops, brothels and begging on the streets. • Between 100,000 and 150,000 Nepalese women and girls were sent in 1995 to India, where they were sexually exploited, reports the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Bangladesh National Women Lawyers’ Association reports that more than 13,000 children were trafficked out of Bangladesh in the last five years. • UNICEF estimates that there are 200,000 child slaves in West and Central Africa. • In June 2000, Human Rights Watch denounced the practice of employing children in slave-like conditions on U.S. farms. About 50,000 women and children enter the United States each year to be used as slaves, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency admitted in April 2000. • In Brazil, 40,000 children are sold every year to work on farms and as domestic servants. The traffickers lure girls with promises of jobs in restaurants in remote parts of the Amazon. Once there, they are forced to work in nightclubs and moved from one mining community to another. • Girls from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are taken to Mexico and sold to brothels for $100 or $200 each, according to Casa Alianza, a human rights NGO that defends children in danger in the region (see page 40). In Nicaragua, an average of one child disappears every three days. From Nepal to Nigeria or Brazil, the methods are the same. Traffickers win the confidence of the parents with a small amount of money or clothes and the children are then entrusted to them. The recruiters promise to look after the children and find them a job that will help raise the standard of living of the whole family. Trafficking in children arises from poverty, the decline of the extended family, lack of education for the children and of other sources of income for the family. But the illicit trade is also a result of how some societies regard children. The parents themselves are often reponsible for the enslavement of their offspring, seeing them as an investment and hoping they will be able to make some contribution to the family income, either in cash or in kind. This view creates fertile ground for child labour and trafficking to develop. Offences that go unpunished In strongly patriarchal societies, women and children have little or no freedom, which explains the extensive discrimination against girls, whose exploitation for sexual purposes or as domestic servants is seen to a certain extent as “normal.” The absence of national legislation aimed at punishing such trafficking makes things easier for the go-betweens and the employers. There is no agreed definition of the crime nor a common standard for penalties. In some countries charges can be pressed in court, but this is very rare. Inefficiencies in law enforcement, including lack of political will and corruption, perpetuate the problem. Lasting scars The ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) is striving to find solutions to the problem. Based on past experience, IPEC has started several projects to help governments combat trafficking of children in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These aim to raise awareness of the issue and free children from exploitative work by tackling the root causes of poverty, ignorance, inadequate educational systems and law enforcement, as well as the lack of remunerative employment for adults. The dreadful conditions which trafficked children work in and their contact with dangerous machinery and materials, as well as the harsh discipline meted out to them, do not simply harm their health. It also subjects them to severe psychological trauma. Separation from their families, the coercion involved in all trafficking, made worse by sexual abuse of child domestics, street children and prostitutes, makes them prone to depression. For many of these victims, this torment paves the way to a life of crime or drug addiction. The price of exploitation In the Camerounian town of Bamenda, you can see notices in the street asking for child workers between six and 14. These are posted by clandestine middlemen who recruit the youngsters for cocoa or cotton plantations, where they will be paid just $14 a month. In Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), employment agencies contract children to work in mines for $10 a month. They also find girls to send to Europe or the United States to work as maids for $25 a month, many of whom end up in child prostitution rackets. With their miserable wages, these children are a pool of virtually free labour. The story is pretty much the same all over West and Central Africa. Trafficking in children for use as cheap labour in conditions of near-slavery has increased there in recent years, as an ILO investigation team found when it visited nine countries in the region. The IPEC studies have traced trafficking routes and identified some countries as mainly suppliers (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali and Togo), while some (Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon) tend to be mainly receivers. Others (Benin and Nigeria) are both. Nigeria seems to be particularly affected by the phenomenon: 1,178 women and children are reported to have been trafficked between March 1999 and December 2000. Most of the children are sold by their parents for between $14 and $40 each. Some of the agents say they manage to find work for as many as 150 children a year. One Nigerian network makes between $10,000 and $12,000 for smuggling a child into New York, U.S. immigration officials say. The system is the same in Asia and Latin America, two other continents described by international human rights organizations as “major suppliers” of child slaves. The total value of this worldwide trade in children is hard to estimate. But experts say it is one of the most profitable forms of organized transnational crime after drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution.