Overview

Child worker in tobacco fields

     While it is still undecided what event started the modern human trafficking movement, historians have readily agreed that the practice of human trafficking has occurred for a long time. It has been recorded to have occurred in "ancient civilizations, the Hellenic, Persian, and Roman Empires" although in another form, slavery (Sychov). Human trafficking refers to 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" (Human Trafficking). Child Trafficking is very similar  but the main focus is on children. Usually, these abducted children are used as a cheap labor source or for prostitution. Many times, these children are lured with "promises of high-quality schooling and vocational training abroad" (West Africa: Stop Trafficking in Child Labor). A common feature many of these victims have include: being orphans, living in a poor family, or having little to no food to eat. While this atrocious act occurs around the world, a major hotspot for this illegal activity is in West Africa. Here, hundreds of thousands of young children are taken and transported across borders to work under harsh conditions. There, they live under harsh conditions and are at a higher risk to contract sexually transmitted diseases and other devastating diseases. The worst part is, after being abducted for a few months or years, many children were only given a bicycle and told to petal home without any sense of direction or personal goods. This harsh life was best exemplified in a personal account from Yawo S, a young boy trafficked to Nigeria at age 9:" If anyone didn't work, they would yell. If you were sick, they never believed it....At the end, we got bikes. We had to find our way back home. The guy who showed us the way had to be paid...(qtd in West Africa: Stop Trafficking in Child Labor). The saddest part is that while governments have started plans to combat this, it is all too often they are too weak to actually do anything. On the brighter side, there are now many organizations designated to end human trafficking, and "it is possible to end this in our lifetime" (Free the Slaves).

Works Cited

1. "Free the Slaves." About Slavery. Free the Slaves, n.d. Web. 22 May 2013. <https://www.freetheslaves.net/SSLPage.aspx?pid=348>.
2. "Stop Trafficking in Child Labor." Human Right Watch. Human Right Watch, n.d. Web. 22 May 2013. <http://www.hrw.org/news/2003/04/01/west-africa-stop-trafficking-child-labor>.
3. Sychov, Alyaksandr. "Human Trafficking: A Call for Global Action." Globality Studies Journal. Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies, n.d. Web. 22 May 2013. <https://globality.cc.stonybrook.edu/?p=114>.
4. "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime." What Is Human Trafficking? United Nations, n.d. Web. 22 May 2013. <http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html>.