and the Construction of Vulnerability - Child Trafficking

A further set of conceptual problems arise from the fact that dominant perceptions
of, and policy responses to, migration are intimately connected to social ideas
about gender and age. Migration has typically been imagined and theorised through
reference to adult men’s movement, with women and children pictured as merely
tagging along behind the primary male migrant. 31 The stereotypes that present
women and children as incapable of independent economic or political action and
passively dependent upon adult males to support and protect them, make women
and children’s vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in the migratory process hypervisible.
This has led to widespread calls for the protection of women, as opposed to
the protection of women’s rights, 32 which at policy level often translate into efforts
to further restrict women’s already limited opportunities for migration. For example:
The construction of women exclusively through the lens of violence has… spawned
initiatives by some states that impose minimum age limits for women workers going
abroad for employment. In 1998, Bangladesh banned women from going abroad
as domestic workers... In a similar vein, although not entirely prohibiting migration
by women, the Nepal Foreign Employment Act 1985 prohibits issuing women with
employment licenses to work overseas without the consent of the woman’s husband
or male guardian… 33
Likewise, much of the growing literature on child trafficking either implicitly or
explicitly reproduces a view of children as a group defined by their naivety, passivity,
incompetence and dependence. This creates the impression that independent
migration by children invariably entails rights violations, leading to a policy emphasis
on preventing child migration and raising young people’s awareness of the risks
of migration, rather than on measures to make migration safer. 34 It also deflects
attention from the rights violations that prompt many children to migrate, and from
the positive aspects of many child migrants’ experience.
3.1 Methodological Problems
Given the conceptual problems associated with the phenomenon, its diversity and
fluidity, and the fact that many forms of migration are criminalised, it is difficult to
produce reliable estimates of the number of individuals and families that have
migrated and/or are affected by migration. In countries of origin, comprehensive
data on those who leave the country are rarely collected. In destination countries,
responsibility for gathering and evaluating migration data may be dispersed amongst
a number of different government bodies and/or international organisations, such
that data are not always recorded using the same categories, definitions or formats. 35
Many of the estimates about specific types of migration are extremely crude, and
based upon a series of extrapolations and assumptions, rather than “hard” facts about
31. King, 2002
32. Miller, 2004
33. Kapur, 2005b, p. 100
34. Marshall and Thatun, 2005, p. 50
35. Whitehead and Hashim, 2005
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Child Migration and the Construction of Vulnerability