Ambiguous Knowledge: Seeking Clarity in the Effort to Define and Assess Trafficking and the Sexual Exploitation of Children
20 Pages Posted: 2 Jul 2007
Date Written: June 30, 2007
Abstract
In an ideal world, we would carefully assess and analyze the characteristics of a social problem and develop responses tailored to address that problem. In contrast, the issue of trafficking in persons has arisen as a political movement addressing an admittedly serious social concern, prompting a number of policy and practice responses to that problem, while the actual assessment of the problem has struggled to keep pace.
Here, I want to raise questions regarding the conventional wisdom about trafficking in a way that suggests the need to rethink our approach to and understanding of the problem. In particular, I suggest that failures in assessment reflect both tendencies towards overt or covert resistance to coercive outside pressures and willful ignorance in deference to other social interests and norms. This problem of assessment applies to both trafficking in general and more specifically to the included/related concern of child sexual exploitation.
In order to explore this problem of assessment, I will start by reviewing the politicized nature of trafficking in persons. I will then review a variety of factors that inhibit or distort efforts to measure and assess this problem. I will conclude by examining the interconnected dynamics of the sexual exploitation and trafficking in children phenomena that affects efforts to define and study it. While this problem of assessment applies throughout the world, my analysis will primarily draw upon research conducted in Latin America, the Caribbean and Brazil.
Keywords: human trafficking, human rights, child sexual exploitation, Latin America, sexual tourism, pornography, slavery, labor exploitation, undocmented migration
JEL Classification: K10, K14, K31, K33, K43
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation