Those Who Buy Children for Sex are Invisible in the UNODC Trafficking Report
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In the last 15 years, the share of trafficking victims around the world who are children has continued to increase and now represents more than 30% of the total number of victims. Of these child trafficking victims, 72% of girls and 23% of boys were trafficked for sexual exploitation. In fact, most people (both adults and children) trafficked around the world are trafficked for sexual exploitation. This important data is found in 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, which also includes detailed analysis about the problem: who are these children, where are they, and why are they trafficked.
The continued growth of child trafficking takes place against a backdrop of universal condemnation of child trafficking. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is almost universally ratified, with the U.S. being the only holdout.
The Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography has been ratified by 176 countries, including the U.S.
The ILO Convention 182 on the Elimination of Worst Forms of Child Labor, which calls for eliminating “practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children,” has been universally ratified.
In 2008, at the World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children held in Brazil, 137 countries, including the U.S., signed a final declaration “to increase efforts to address the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents through the development of holistic national protection systems.…”
Despite governments’ commitment to ending the sale and exploitation of children, the problem does not just persist -- it grows. Every government has signaled its intent to stop these forms of child abuse. So what’s the problem? The answer is one that is perhaps best demonstrated by its absence in the report.
Among the strengths of the 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons are its excellent inventory of the social and economic factors that make children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. It shows that there are well-developed research and enhanced data sets depicting the driving forces that help expand the supply of child trafficking around the world. Poverty is one of the strongest contributors to child trafficking, whether an individual is trafficked for labor or sex. Long-term endemic poverty and acute economic blows to a family’s income, such as the current pandemic, are root causes of child trafficking. The other elements in the inventory of vulnerabilities include a “…Child with a dysfunctional family…Child deprived of parental care….Emotional attachment to the trafficker….Mental, Behavioural or Neurological (MBN) disorder….Immigration status.” It does an excellent job of talking about criminal networks and more informal methods to recruit and traffic children. Overall, the report presents a rich picture of all of the nuances of how trafficking takes place across the globe.
But it is troubling that there is no analysis at all on the demand for children’s bodies in the sex industry. The context in which child trafficking takes place is a blind spot in the report. A huge sex market exists in every country, in every region, rich and poor alike, and it sets the stage for the recruitment of both adults and children for sex trafficking.
The factors that make children vulnerable to sex trafficking and the mitigation efforts that would prevent it are already well known, including structural reasons in the world economy, in cultural practice, and in social inequities. But the potential solutions are not well implemented. The gaping hole in the report is the lack of a description of the child sex market where children’s sexual abuse is purchased. Child sex trafficking can only be disrupted if there is an emphasis on the buyers, not just on the vulnerabilities facing children.
It is interesting, and perhaps promising, that one new section in the report gives an inkling about what an emphasis on demand might reveal. The section describes how exploiters and traffickers now use online means of establishing a relationship and recruiting vulnerable children for exploitation. One sentence is very telling: “One court case showed how a single trafficker managed to connect one victim with more than 100 sex buyers over two months using an online ad.” Another section mentions the huge number of “escort services” where both adults and children are bought and sold. These references are a glimpse of the market of buyers who snap up the supply of vulnerable, trafficked children. The dearth of data about these buyers is the embodiment of the environment that is rendered invisible by so many official trafficking reports such as this one. Ignoring it helps contribute to the normalization of sex-buying.
Every child has the human right to protection from sexual exploitation and every government has acknowledged this. But it can’t be achieved without broadening the lens to recognize, describe, and analyze the demand side, the buyers, and the sex industry. They receive scant attention here.
At some point, the UN and governments will have to begin to show the real problem, the buyers who have disposable income and impunity to take advantage of children’s vulnerability. Let’s hope next year that UNODC writes a report where its excellent data gathering and analysis are focused on those who exploit both adults and children in the trafficking market. This will take a sea-change in how we think about the problem, but it is long overdue.
By Carol Smolenski, one of the founders of ECPAT-USA and has been an advocate in the field of children’s rights for thirty years
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