Children Trafficked to the United States: Myths and Realities

Elżbieta M. Goździak is director of research at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University.

Human trafficking continues to capture the imagination of the global public. Gut-wrenching narratives about women kept as sexual slaves and children sold into domestic servitude appear on the front pages of major international newspapers, in academic journals, and in books sold in university and commercial bookstores. Public discourse emphasises the particular vulnerability of trafficked children, related to bio-physiological, social, behavioural, and cognitive phases of the maturation process, and underscores the necessity to act in the children’s best interest. Little systematic research has been done on this issue. There are a lot of writings about human trafficking, mainly for sexual exploitation, but there is significantly less literature based on empirical research. The dominant anti-trafficking discourse is not evidence-based but grounded in the construction of a particular mythology of trafficking.

The body of academic literature on trafficked children is especially limited. Trafficked children are usually subsumed under the heading, “Trafficked Women and Children”. Interestingly, women and children are lumped together in anti-trafficking legislation and discourse when in many other instances, in labour laws, for example, great care is taken to separate the two. Many writers use the word “children” or “girls” but focus on young women; research on trafficked boys is virtually non-existent. Limited knowledge impedes identification of trafficked children, obstructs provision of culturally appropriate and effective services, limits prevention of repeat victimisation, and results in few prosecutions of perpetrators.

This article is informed by empirical research, supported by the US National Institute of Justice, to examine the experiences of children, mainly girls, trafficked to the United States for labour and sexual exploitation and to analyse their prospects for reintegration into the wider society. The cohort of possible study participants was relatively small—approximately 140 children placed in foster care through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors programme administered by two national voluntary agencies: the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. But the project’s goals were lofty—to expand the knowledge-base of the special service needs of trafficked children and set forth policy and programmatic recommendations aimed at preventing child trafficking, protecting trafficked children, and prosecuting their traffickers.

The year-long research project (2007–8) included face-to-face ethnographic interviews with more than thirty survivors of child trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation; a series of telephone and in-person interviews with service providers working with the survivors at various junctures of their journey from captivity to reintegration into US society; as well as an in-depth analysis of the case files of all child survivors served by federally funded programmes at the time of the research. I have examined the difficulties and benefits of this study elsewhere.¹ Here, I want to address some of the prevailing assumptions and myths “woven from solid data, conjecture, cultural assumptions, and organizational and political agendas”² and juxtapose them with the realities, as expressed by the survivors of child trafficking and the discoveries made by the research team.

‘Tidal Waves’ of Trafficking?

A recent unpublished report prepared by Senator Tom Coburn’s office, aptly entitled “Blind Faith: How Congress Is Failing Trafficking Victims” (2011), takes issue with flawed estimates of the scope of human trafficking and the exorbitant resources spent on anti-trafficking initiatives. These criticisms are not new. Several years ago, a front-page article in the Washington Post  criticised the US government’s alarming statements, based on methodologically flawed estimates, about “tidal waves” of trafficked persons entering the country.³ The same criticism about worldwide estimates promulgated by the US State Department has been expressed by UNESCO, the US Department of Justice (2005), and by the Government Accountability Office, which in a 2006 report concluded that statistics provided by the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons were problematic because of “methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and numerical discrepancies”.⁴

The Washington Post article was also critical of the government’s inability to identify victims. Since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 through to the end of February 2012, 2,899 trafficked adults (1,801 women and 1,098 men) and 441 children (299 girls and 142 boys) have been identified and certified as eligible for federally funded services. The small number of adults and children identified so far could be as much a result of the clandestine nature of the trafficking phenomenon as of the inadequate and misplaced strategies used to identify trafficked persons. Or standard estimates—approximately fifteen thousand people trafficked into the United States annually and anywhere from eight hundred thousand to two million worldwide—might far exceed the reality and gravity of the situation which, in the absence of reliable data, take on mythical proportions.

Some experts suggest that the government should broaden its strategies to include an enhanced screening of children at US borders, particularly unaccompanied children. Each year, immigration officials apprehend approximately one hundred thousand unaccompanied children at US borders. Some return voluntarily, some are returned because of bilateral agreements. Little is known about the children who return to their countries of origin. Approximately eight thousand children remain annually in the custody of the US federal government. Some nine hundred children are in custody at any given time. Experts stress that there is a good possibility that both the larger population of children returned to their homelands as well as the smaller group of children in federal custody include trafficked children.⁵ To date, nobody has studied any of these children. It is therefore possible that these assertions are part of the many myths surrounding human trafficking.

The Diversity of Victims

A comprehensive analysis of approximately 1,500 English-language publications on human trafficking indicates that most rely on overviews, commentaries, and anecdotal information, and are not grounded in empirical research with trafficked adults and children.⁶ Not surprisingly, trafficked persons, including children, are often depicted as a very homogenous group. Authors discuss trafficked “women and children” or “children” without any regard to age or gender differences. Sometimes even the country of origin is omitted. The trafficking narratives follow a sensationalist storyline and present readers with generalised portraits