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B- Protecting Children from Trafficking
Child trafficking affects children throughout the world, in both industrialized and developing countries. Trafficking of children links consequently all countries and regions in a web of international crime. Every year, children are smuggled across borders and sold like commodities. Others are trafficked within their home countries, usually from rural to urban areas. Trafficking not only violates the children rights guaranteed under international law but it threatens also Children’s survival, development and clearly their protection.
Defining Child Trafficking
What is child trafficking?
Trafficking was first defined by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime in 2000 in international law through the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Known as the ‘Palermo Protocol’ or the ‘Trafficking Protocol’, this is the most widely endorsed definition of trafficking and it provides an essential basis for national law reform.
The UN’s Trafficking Protocol defines what constitutes ‘trafficking in persons’ in cases involving adults as being the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or reception of persons, by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, fraud, abuse of power, deception or payment for the purposes of exploitation.
DEFINITION OF TRAFFICKING FROM THE PALERMO PROTOCOL
Article 3
a) Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;
c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered ‘trafficking in persons’ even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;
d) ‘Child’ shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.
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The UN’s Trafficking Protocol sets out a slightly modified definition in the case of children (anyone under the age of 18). In the case of children and adolescents under 18, it involves their being recruited and possibly moved to a location where they are to be exploited, either within their own country (‘internal trafficking’) or abroad (cross-border or transnational trafficking).
A ‘child victim of trafficking’ is consequently any person under 18 who is recruited, transported, transferred, harbored or received for the purpose of exploitation, either within or outside a country. The use of illicit means, including violence, threat or fraud, is irrelevant.
The following elements put together constitute a case of Child Trafficking:
- Involvement of children: persons below 18 years of age.
- Movement of the child(ren) from one place to another, by way of procurement, sale, purchase, recruitment, transportation, transfer or harbouring.
- Use of force, threat, deception or fraud.
- Some consideration (in cash or in kind).
- Gain or profit of some other person.
- Exploitation of the child(ren) either during the process of being trafficked or in the end result of trafficking.
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