Child trafficking in West Africa has increasingly been framed as a singular criminal phenomenon, detached from the complex socio-cultural, economic, and historical realities that shape children’s mobility, labour participation, and kinship-based care arrangements. Drawing exclusively on interdisciplinary scholarship and policy-oriented literature, this article offers an extensive theoretical and analytical interrogation of dominant trafficking discourses, with particular emphasis on Ghana, Nigeria, and the wider West African sub-region. It argues that prevailing global and national anti-trafficking frameworks often obscure children’s agency, misrecognise culturally embedded practices such as fostering and labour migration, and produce unintended harms through criminalisation and rescue-oriented interventions. By synthesising perspectives from childhood studies, feminist political economy, human rights law, migration studies, and critical criminology, the article demonstrates how binaries such as victim versus agent, trafficking versus migration, and protection versus exploitation are analytically insufficient. The methodology is grounded in qualitative meta-synthesis of peer-reviewed research, international reports, and legal analyses, allowing for a nuanced reconstruction of empirical patterns and conceptual debates without reliance on primary field data. The findings reveal persistent tensions between international legal instruments, national enforcement regimes, and everyday survival strategies of families and children under conditions of structural poverty and inequality. The discussion highlights how anti-trafficking campaigns, celebrity advocacy, and visual propaganda contribute to moral panics, while often marginalising children’s own voices and lived experiences. The article concludes by proposing a reconceptualisation of child trafficking that foregrounds interdependence, social reproduction, and contextual agency, and calls for policy approaches that move beyond punitive logics towards rights-based, child-centred, and structurally informed responses.  

Child trafficking, child migration, agency

Abdullah, A., Cudjoe, E., Emery, C. R., & Frederico, M. (2020). Moving towards independent living in Ghana: Narratives from young adults about their kinship care experience. Journal of Adolescence, 79, 148–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2020.01.005

Abebe, T. (2019). Reconceptualising children’s agency as continuum and interdependence. Social Sciences, 8(3), 81. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8030081

Adesina, O. S. (2014). Modern day slavery: Poverty and child trafficking in Nigeria. African Identities, 12(2), 165–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2014.881278

Bastia, T. (2005). Child trafficking or teenage migration? Bolivian migrants in Argentina. International Migration, 43(4), 58–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2005.00333.x

Boakye-Boaten, A. (2010). Changes in the concept of childhood: Implications on children in Ghana. Journal of International Social Research, 3(10), 1–12.

Carrington, K., & Hearn, J. (2003). Trafficking and the sex industry: From impunity to protection. Canberra: Australian Parliamentary Library.

Chuang, J. (2005). The United States as global sheriff: Using unilateral sanctions to combat human trafficking. Michigan Journal of International Law, 27, 437–494.

Countryman-Roswurm, K. (2015). Rise, unite, support: Doing “no harm” in the anti-trafficking movement. Slavery Today Journal, 2(1), 26–47.

De Lange, A. (2007). Child labour migration and trafficking in rural Burkina Faso. International Migration, 45(2), 147–167. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2007.00407.x

Demeke, S. (2024). A human rights-based approach for effective criminal justice response to human trafficking. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 9(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-023-00143-4

Derby, N. (2012). Are the barrels empty? Are the children any safer? Child domestic labor and servitude in Ghana. Ghana: Palgrave Macmillan.

Desyllas, M. C. (2007). A critique of the global trafficking discourse and U.S. policy. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 34(4), 57–79.

Doezema, J. (1998). Forced to choose—beyond the voluntary v forced prostitution dichotomy. In K. Kempadoo & J. Doezema (Eds.), Global sex workers: Rights, resistance and redefinition (pp. 34–50). New York: Routledge.

Doezema, J. (1999). Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of white slavery in contemporary discourses of trafficking in women. Gender Issues, 18(1), 23–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-999-0021-9

Dottridge, M. (2007). Collateral damage: The impact of anti-trafficking measures on human rights around the world. Bangkok: GAATW.

Dottridge, M. (2008). Young people’s voices on child trafficking: Experiences from South Eastern Europe. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.

Dougnon, I. (2011). Child trafficking or labor migration? A historical perspective from Mali's Dogon country. Humanity, 2(1), 85–105. https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2011.0008

Einarsdóttir, J., & Boiro, H. (2014). The Palermo Protocol: Trafficking takes it all. Stjórnmál og Stjórnsýsla, 10(2), 387–398. https://doi.org/10.13177/irpa.a.2014.10.2.10

Farrell, A., & Fahy, S. (2009). The problem of human trafficking in the US: Public frames and policy responses. Journal of Criminal Justice, 37(6), 617–626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2009.09.010

Golo, H. K., & Eshun, I. (2019). Retrafficking in the coastal communities and the Volta Lake of Ghana. American Journal of Business and Society, 4(4), 97–107.

Goody, E. (1982). Parenthood and social reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, P., & Tindall, K. (2009). Leadership by the famous. In J. Kane et al. (Eds.), Dispersed democratic leadership (pp. 255–278). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hashim, I., & Thorsen, D. (2011). Child migration in Africa. London: Zed Books.

Haynes, D. F. (2014). The celebritization of human trafficking. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 653(1), 25–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716213515837

Heissler, K. A. (2013). Rethinking ‘trafficking’ in children's migratory processes. Children's Geographies, 11(1), 89–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.743283

Huijsmans, R. (2011). Child migration and questions of agency. Development and Change, 42(5), 1307–1321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01729.x

ILO. (2024). Profits and poverty: The economics of forced labour (2nd ed.). Geneva: International Labour Office.

International Organization for Migration. (2018). Training manual on caring for trafficked persons. Zimbabwe: IOM.

International Organization for Migration. (2022). No escape. Geneva: IOM.

Isiugo-Abanihe, U. C. (1985). Child fosterage in West Africa. Population and Development Review, 11(1), 53–73.

Laird, S. (2002). The 1998 Children's Act: Problems of enforcement in Ghana. British Journal of Social Work, 32(7), 893–905.

Lobasz, J. K. (2009). Beyond border security. Security Studies, 18(2), 319–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410902900020

Mbakogu, I. (2015). Understanding child trafficking from the point of view of trafficked children. Doctoral dissertation, McGill University.

Mbakogu, I. (2021). Child fostering or child trafficking. Indonesian Journal of Social and Environmental Issues, 2(1), 22–30. https://doi.org/10.47540/ijsei.v2i1.101

Mbakogu, I. (2022). The curse of familiar faces. Urban Crime, 3(1), 33–64.

Mbakogu, I., & Odiyi, L. (2021). Child sexual abuse, disclosure and reintegration. Journal of Social Work Education and Practice, 6(3), 8–24.

O’Connell Davidson, J. (2010). New slavery, old binaries. Global Networks, 10(2), 244–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2010.00284.x

O’Connell Davidson, J. (2016). De-canting ‘trafficking in human beings’. The International Spectator, 51(1), 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2016.1121685

Okyere, S., Agyeman, N., & Saboro, E. (2021). The ethics and politics of audio-visual propaganda. Anti-Trafficking Review, 16, 47–68. https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201221164

Pearce, J. J. (2011). Working with trafficked children and young people. British Journal of Social Work, 41(8), 1424–1441. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcr029

Rijken, C. (2009). A human rights based approach to trafficking in human beings. Security and Human Rights, 20(3), 212–222.

Sertich, M., & Heemskerk, M. (2011). Ghana's Human Trafficking Act. Human Rights Brief, 19(1), 2–7.

Sharapov, K., & Mendel, J. (2018). Trafficking in human beings. Cultural Sociology, 12(4), 540–560. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975518788

UNODC. (2021). Human trafficking in West Africa. Nigeria: UNODC.

UNODC. (2024). Global report on trafficking in persons 2024. United Nations.

Uy, R. (2011). Blinded by red lights. Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, 26, 204–219.

Walmsley, E. (2008). Raised by another mother. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 13(1), 168–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7180.2008.00008.x

Wilson, M., & O’Brien, E. (2016). Constructing the ideal victim. Crime, Law and Social Change, 65(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-015-9600-8