Abstract
Popular discourses on child trafficking are generally characterised by unverifiable statistics, melodramatic representations, and emotional reactions. More so, notions of poverty, exploitation, and the protection of children from harm have driven educational and sensitisation campaigns that seek to address trafficking in children. The ensuing status quo blurs diverse cultural conceptions of childhood and its moral representations of acceptable and unacceptable labour. Drawing on qualitative data from a Ghanaian fishing community, this paper reviews the impoverished and hazardous representation of children’s transportation to other fishing communities for work. It contends that the prevailing conceptualisation of child trafficking fails to account for the socio-cultural underpinnings of children’s movement to other fishing communities for work. Consequently, this paper argues that it is important to situate popular discourses of child trafficking within fishing community’s conceptualisation of childhood in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon within those communities.
Highlights
The nature and status of children has received tremendous attention from the twentieth century onwards.[1]
The findings of this study revealed varied conceptualisations of childhood based on age, body, and morality
It is problematic to ascribe a universal definition of children as persons below 18 years of age to all Ghanaian societies since their conceptualisation of childhood may differ significantly from the typology of childhood prescribed within Ghana’s Human Trafficking Act
Summary
The nature and status of children has received tremendous attention from the twentieth century onwards.[1] This is evident in the unanimous support for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) of 1990 and other parallel conventions mostly promulgated by the International Labour Organization (ILO).[2] This ensuing trend has led to the institutionalisation of a global model of childhood based on child rights and the abolition of worst forms of child labour (and child trafficking) in order to protect children from harm.[3] Not surprisingly, state interventions within the sphere of childhoods have gained more prominence with the introduction of the aforementioned international legal frameworks.[4] The renewed interest in the lives of children has been made possible by the contemporary description and representations of the spheres of childhoods, resulting in the creation of a typology of childhoods based on western ideals.[5] This western bias is reinforced by the dominance of white (predominantly male) scholars in the theorisation of childhood and construction of children’s rights.[6]
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