Child Trafficking

Child trafficking is the act of using force, fraud, or coercion to get a minor – someone under 18 – to perform involuntary acts of labor, such as sex work, child marriage, and being a child soldier. Trafficked children experience many types of abuse and neglect.

Millions of children are trafficked every year for many different reasons. In some countries and cultures, child marriage – when one or both of the parties to the marriage are below the age of 18 – is legal and even normalized. According to the Pew Research Center [1], at least 117 countries around the world allow it to happen, and in the U.S., it is legal in 44 states (only Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island have set the minimum age at 18 and eliminated all exceptions) and 20 U.S. states do not require any minimum age for marriage, with a parental or judicial waiver.

Over 1/4 of the detected human trafficking victims are children, according to the United Nations.

Child labor occurs often in domestic workplaces, agriculture, and small businesses. But not all work done by children is automatically classified as child labor. Child labor is defined as as work that deprives children of their childhood and is harmful to their psychological and physical development.

It is important to consider the fact that child labor is NOT always human trafficking. There is some academic debate on the definition of human trafficking and modern slavery, but there are, without any doubt, clear overlaps. Human trafficking is defined by the Palermo Protocol as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of an individual by means of threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation. For many cases of child labor, one of the "Action"-part of the AMP-Model is not present, meaning that child labor is not necessarily human trafficking.

Family members and relatives are to blame for 41% of recruitment for child trafficking cases as the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC) discovered. [2]

Traffickers often groom their victims and gain their trust, which is later on betrayed. They then may threaten the families and promise the children that only with them, they will have a good future.