ABSTRACT

Benin has long been identified as an “epicenter” of the international traffic in children (Aide et Action, 2005). This chapter contends that it is not. Using interviews and participant observation conducted with groups of adolescents identified as trafficked—girls who have been in domestic service or market work and boys currently or formerly engaged in quarry-work—the chapter argues that the discourse of trafficking rests on narrow, received ideas that do not correspond to the empirics of young Beninese lives. The trafficking discourse constructs adolescent departures from the family home as the result of corrupted tradition (particularly in the form of “child placement”), economic crisis, or criminality. It also portrays them as nearly always abusive. Our data, however, suggest that things are much more complex, and often a good deal more benign. Teenagers are often highly agentive in their movement, and whether it is they or their families who decide that they should migrate for work, they do so in the pursuit of personal and familial advancement. As such, what is characterized as trafficking would be better understood (and responded to) as youth labor migration.