A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re-Conceptualizing Young People’s Involvement in Organized Crime

Abstract

Millions of the world’s children engage in labor, often exploitative and essential to their survival. Child labor is closely related to crime; global discourse illustrates how young people are victims of forced and bonded labor and recent studies from the global South demonstrate how young people are hired as the ‘illicit laborers’ of organized crime groups. Despite this, there is a tendency to consider young people, not as laborers but as victims of trafficking or as offenders (often in relation to gangs). To address this lacuna, the article draws on data from 3 studies conducted in the global South to develop a conceptual framework suitable for understanding the intersection between labor and crime. The article develops a metaphorical ‘labor lens’, a lens which centers and prioritizes labor and instrumental drivers for crime, embedded within wider structures of illicit markets, established organized crime, state:crime collaboration and the need for children to work to survive. The article integrates economic drivers for involvement in organized crime with the moral economy, within the context of ecological frameworks of crime, embedded with wider issues of coloniality. In doing so, the article develops a new conceptual framework for considering young people’s involvement in organized crime.