Teenage Labor Migration and Antitrafficking Policy in West Africa

• Author: Neil Howard
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716213519242
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014

124 ANNALS, AAPSS, 653, May 2014

DOI: 10.1177/0002716213519242

Teenage Labor

Migration and

Antitrafficking

Policy in West

Africa

By

NEIL HOWARD

519242ANN The Annals of the American AcademyTeenage Labor Migration in West Africa

research-article2014

Within the antitrafficking community, even legal child

or youth work is often pathologized, seen as a “worst

form of child labor” or, where movement is involved, as

trafficking. Major policy responses thus focus on

attempting to protect the young by preventing their

movement or policing their work. Using a case study of

adolescent labor migrants in Benin who work in artisa-

nal gravel quarries in Nigeria, I provide evidence that

suggests that the dominant discourse regarding this

kind of labor is inaccurate and that policies based on it

may be failing. This is in large part because the labor

migration depicted as “trafficking” by the antitraffick-

ing community is not experienced as such by young

migrants.

Keywords: child trafficking; teenage labor migration;

mining; Benin; Nigeria

Child trafficking emerged as the premier

international child protection issue in the

1990s (International Labour Organization-

International Program on the Elimination of

Child Labour [ILO-IPEC] 2002; O’Connell

Davidson 2011; Riisøen, Hatløy, and Bjerkan

2004). Since then, it has predominantly been

understood as a question of innocent and

unsuspecting minors kidnapped and enslaved

by criminal gangs, their vulnerability com-

pounded by grinding poverty or corrupt tradi-

tional practices. Dominant policy responses

have thus tended toward the draconian—by

paralleling efforts to “end child labor” through

targeting the work that is equated with traffick-

ing or the migration that leads to it (Huijsmans

Neil Howard is a Marie Curie Fellow at the European

University Institute in Florence, Italy.

NOTE: Research for this article was conducted for the

author’s doctorate in International Development at the

University of Oxford. He thanks Bridget Anderson and

Jo Boyden for their comments and the Economic and

Social Research Council for its financial assistance.

TEENAGE LABOR MIGRATION IN WEST AFRICA 125

and Baker 2012). This article critically assesses this issue by deconstructing what

has been understood as a paradigmatic case of child trafficking—the labor migra-

tion of teenage boys from Benin to the artisanal gravel quarries of Abeokuta,

Nigeria.1 Using data gathered between 2010 and 2012 from interviews and par-

ticipant observation with these boys, their employers, and their communities, this

article argues that these boys’ migrant labor is not equivalent to trafficking, is not

experienced as such, and instead represents a reasoned response to a very narrow

set of social and economic options. The article argues further that attempts to

outlaw such labor practices are destined to fail.

The Dominant Paradigm

In the past 15 years, child trafficking has exploded as an international issue. The

dominant discourse around it has constructed both the migration to worksites

and the work itself as inherently problematic, resulting from a variety of patho-

logical causes (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008; Hashim 2003; Hashim and

Thorsen 2011; Huijsmans and Baker 2012; Morganti 2011; Whitehead, Hashim,

and Iversen 2007). The dominant paradigm can be seen in many official publica-

tions. One particularly influential UNICEF report states:

The trafficking of children is one of the gravest violations of human rights in the world

today. Children and their families are ensnared by the empty promises of the trafficking

networks—promises of a better life, of an escape route from poverty—and every year,

hundreds of thousands of children are smuggled across borders and sold as mere com-

modities. Their survival and development are threatened, and their rights to education,

to health, to grow up within a family, to protection from exploitation and abuse are

denied. (UNICEF 2003, 6)

The ILO echoes this perspective:

Sometimes it is the children themselves or their families who take the initiative to

migrate and who approach recruiters. Generally they have no idea of the fate that awaits

them. Even if they are aware that hardships lie ahead, they rarely understand the nature

nor the duration of the suffering they will face. … In the worst cases, it can [result in a]

child’s disappearance or death, or can permanently damage his/her physical and mental

health. (ILO-IPEC 2002, x–xi)

Within this discursive framework are a number of binaries—consent/coercion,

normal/abusive, legitimate/exploitative—which ignore important ambiguities,

contingencies, and the structural contexts within which migration and trafficking

take place and are experienced by those involved in labor migration.

This lack of nuance is reflected also in the international legal framework that

has developed around child trafficking and in the mainstream policy efforts that

seek to prevent it. According to this framework, three major factors differentiate

child from adult trafficking. These are that (1) coercion or deception is not neces-

sary for an exploitative act to constitute child trafficking, (2) that a minor’s