When I give talks about child labour, exploitation and trafficking, someone in the audience always asks me whether I find my work depressing. I’ve written in earlier blogs that I always reply that yes, from time to time, the story of a child (or more often a child I actually meet on my travels) breaks through the protective shell and brings me to tears. I also always tell people, though, that what keeps me going, among other things, is working with some amazing people who are doing everything they can to make the world a better place – not only for children but for all those who need a bit of help. I am privileged to call many of these people my friends.
One such person is Lars LÖÖf, whom I first met many years ago when he was working with the Swedish arm of Save the Children, and I was working with the European Commission’s Daphne Programme to end violence against children, young people and women. We met often in meetings from Brussels to Yokohama and once, unforgettably, in Valencia, Spain, where Lars introduced me to the local drink which is made of freshly squeezed orange juice and a much larger quantity of vodka!
A new report on trafficking into begging and crime
Although Lars and I now live on different continents and meet much less frequently, we keep in touch and he never fails to keep me up to date on the work he is doing as Head of the Children’s Unit at the Council of the Baltic Sea States. I have just had the opportunity to read a new report the CBSS Expert Group for Cooperation on Children at Risk has published on Children trafficked for exploitation in begging and criminality (you can download it at: http://www.childcentre.info/children-trafficked-for-exploitation-in-begging-and-criminality-new-report/).
The problem of children who are trafficked so that they can be used in begging or criminal activity (from burglary and pick-pocketing to selling drugs and other more serious crimes) is a thorny issue. Because there are “other” victims involved – the victims of the crime committed — people are often torn between wanting to see the child punished for the crime and trying to understand that the child is also a victim. Generally there is someone else lurking in the background, an adult who is controlling the child and actually making the profit from the crime. This person, though, is rarely caught – it is the child who is caught, and that’s part of the reason cowardly adult criminals use children in the first place.
The report from the CBSS focuses on the member states of the Council: Lithuania, Poland, Norway and Sweden. The regular movement of people and goods among these countries means that they have a particular interest in working together to combat cross-border crimes of many kinds, including human trafficking. The open borders of the European Union mean that many of the people involved in trafficking in this region, both as victims and as perpetrators, are from Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and Moldova, known as major source countries of trafficked people.
On the streets of Europe
If you have travelled in Europe in the past decade, you will be very aware of the large numbers of people begging on the streets of Europe’s capital cities. The streets around the Louvre in Paris, the railway station in Berlin and the Medici tombs in Florence are crowded with the sad, malnourished faces of women and children asking for money. The most frequent sight is the scarved woman sitting on the pavement with a baby asleep in her arms, hand outstretched. It is difficult to just walk past without offering some help. And this is exactly what the traffickers and exploiters count on. Look around and you may see one of them – a dark shadowy figure on a nearby street corner, keeping a watch on the woman to make sure she is doing her “job”. He may, at the same time, be watching a second woman on an adjacent street. In fact, he may have a whole cohort of victims he is “handling”, like something out of a Victorian novel, waiting for them to get the 40 or 50 Euros he has told them to bring back, and ready to beat, kick or burn them if they do not.
You may also have fallen victim to a pick-pocket, perhaps a young one. A few years ago I was in Florence, Italy, walking along minding my own business when two young Eastern European girls, maybe 10 or 11 years old, accosted me and shoved a newspaper into my face. The front page headline was about some dreadful event that had happened, and as I looked at it they urged me to help them. It was quite by chance that I felt a slight tug on my bag and ripped the paper aside to see that one of the girls had her hand in my bag and was in the process of stealing my purse. It was a class act – polished, I suspect, over many attempts both successful and unsuccessful.
Behind these children, though, are the people who exploit their youth, their quick hands and their appealing demeanours to make a profit. The children have little choice but to do as they are told. Even where they seem to be “willing” accomplices, we have to remember that they are invariably trying to escape a life of poverty and disadvantage, and that this is a major factor in their falling into the hands of traffickers and exploiters in the first place. While I argue repeatedly that poverty is in itself not the main cause of trafficking, it is very clear that poverty pushed to the point of desperation greatly increases the risk that people will be exploited.
It’s worth noting, also, that the traffickers are very good at what they do. Their cunning and the lengths to which they will go to exploit people for money know no bounds. We know, for example – and the new CBSS report confirms this – that traffickers often a move a mother and children together (and sometimes father too), but that somewhere along the route they split up the family. A woman may arrive on the streets of Paris with a baby that belongs to someone else, knowing that the only way she will ever see her own child again is to do exactly what the exploiters tell her to do.
We also know, and again this is confirmed by cases outlined in the CBSS report, that many of the young children you see in the arms of a begging woman are drugged to keep them calm. People don’t give money so readily to an infant that is screaming and bawling. You may well have noticed the ‘rag doll’ appearance of many of the babes in arms – they are limp and lifeless, which only adds to the desire to want to give some money to help out.
In Asia too
Exploiting children in begging, and in criminal activities, is not only a European problem, though. If you have ever walked along an elevated walkway or pedestrian bridge in Bangkok, Thailand, you will have had to take care not to trip over one of the many beggars sitting in your path asking for money. Often here, too, they are women with children.
In this case, the woman begging may also have a child with her who is not her own. In a major difference to the women we see in Europe, though, many of the women begging on the streets of Bangkok have paid to use the child for begging. Many of these women have crossed the border from Cambodia, where they gave a poor family a small sum of money in exchange for taking a child with them to beg on the streets of the Thai capital.
These women are traffickers. They have moved a child in order to exploit her/him and the fact that the family received money is not at all relevant. The child – no matter how old – has rights and among these the right not to be exploited or trafficked.
The women begging in Bangkok, though, focus our attention on the need to stop this horrendous violation of children’s rights and to keep the child’s best interests at the centre of what we do.
A few years ago I interviewed a group of child welfare activists who had received money from the Government of Thailand to run a campaign in Bangkok calling on locals and tourists not to give money to beggars but to report them to the police. This may at first glance seem like a fair thing to do – begging is, after all, illegal in Thailand. But no-one had asked what the reactions of the Cambodian women might be if they were no longer able to beg and the child they had to feed and look after was no longer making money for them. Many of these children would simply be abandoned, with no way to identify them or return them to their families. Worse still, many would simply be discarded, thrown into a dumper or canal, one less worry for the trafficker who was no longer able to make a profit from them.
So what can you do?
I wish I had an answer to this question. In some countries, certainly, you could go to the police and they would know how to handle the situation. Sadly in other countries this would probably just put the trafficking victims themselves at risk.
I used to think that refusing to hand over money but to offer a begging child food might be one suitable response. My thinking was that at least the child would eat then, and the trafficker would not profit. But of course I had no way of knowing how the trafficker might react if the child returned at night fed but empty-handed. And once when I tried to give three children begging in a fast-food restaurant a meal, a very angry woman stormed up to me, threw the food on the floor and screamed “Money, money!”
That’s what it’s all about, after all.