‘Precious Children in a Heartless World’? The Complexities of Child Trafficking in Marseille

Abstract

This article examines how implicit notions in the concepts of ‘children’ and ‘home’ influence the study of child trafficking. Where children and adults are often presented as oppositional categories, home is regarded as territorialised, essentialised and unchangeable. These social constructions oversimplify trafficked and migrating children’s experiences, which is illustrated by three cases from the context of Marseille. They suggest that children’s agency may be better accounted for if we move from a focus on them being forcefully torn away from the safe place of home, to children’s strategies of placing themselves, continuously, in changing, hierarchical social settings.