RIGHTS-AFRICA: Trafficking of Children on the Rise

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 15 2001 (IPS) - Trafficking of children to be used as cheap labour is growing in nine countries in west and central Africa, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) reported Friday.

The ILO report includes interviews with children and their parents in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Togo.

The results of the first phase of the programme of which the study formed part were presented Friday on the eve of the Day of the African Child, which is celebrated Jun 16.

Poverty is the main factor that leads parents to send their children away with middlemen involved in child smuggling networks, says the report. Another element mentioned is “the decline throughout the region of the extended family system and the traditional forms of solidarity linked to it.”

Parents decide to turn over their children without taking into account the consequences or the harm the children will suffer in the future, because “they simply have no other choice,” says the ILO.

The study does not mention how many children in the region are affected by trafficking, but does specify that the phenomenon involves children as young as five, most of whom come from large, rural families of at least five children, with low levels of education.

In general, girl victims of trafficking are put to work as domestics or street vendors. Boys go to plantations, construction sites or mines.

Both girls and boys are sexually exploited by prostitution networks, says the Geneva-based United Nations agency that can be located at the following website: http://www.ilo.org.

In some cases, the intermediaries participating in the trafficking are relatives or family acquaintances, although others are strangers and even foreigners.

The men and women who act as intermediaries promise to find paid work for the child, and on some occasions offer the parents a small advance payment in cash.

The intermediaries obtain their profits by selling the child or by taking most or all of their wages. The children’s employers include the owners of bars, restaurants, garages and plantations.

In Gabon and Ivory Coast it was found that immigrant employers tended to seek children of their own nationality. For example, minors from Mali were taken to the Ivory Coast to work on plantations owned by immigrants from Mali.

“Children separated from their families lose all protection and are completely dependent on their intermediary or employer,” says the report.

“In addition, cross-border trafficking takes the child to an unknown country, in which sometimes another language is spoken, and where the child is without a residence permit.

“Employers take advantage of the precariousness of the child’s situation to use him/her for whatever they want. It has been shown that working conditions are generally miserable, e.g. long working days with insufficient pauses, working with dangerous tools or substances in an unhealthy environment,” the ILO adds.

“The phenomenon of trafficking makes children lose their human dignity,” the study concludes. “They are traumatised by abominable working conditions, ill treatment and disease, and develop a feeling of being outcasts of society. This can lead to delinquency, consumption of drugs or long-term mental disorders.”

The study, carried out with financing from the U.S. Department of Labour, recommends a subregional plan including research, awareness-raising, training, the strengthening of legal frameworks, aid to victims, and bilateral cooperation for the repatriation of the affected minors and extradition of traffickers.

The initiative is part of the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), created by the ILO as part of the application of the 1999 international convention against the worst forms of child labour.

As part of that mission, IPEC announced this week the start of programmes in Tanzania, Nepal and El Salvador, aimed at putting an end to the worst forms of child labour within the next 10 years.