ABSTRACT
One of the central ambitions of this book has been to locate the activities of child trafficking and the associated responses from official agencies within the broader contexts in which they are enacted. The empirical analysis centres on specific splinters of territory, one Romanian village and the West End of London, as source and destination. Yet these activities implicate and are implicated in multiple settings, practices and processes during the course of their execution. Common to other examinations of transnational criminal activity, our analysis reveals how (late) modern forms of transportation and communication have enabled criminal groups to exploit vulnerable people for profit. Understandings of trafficking, therefore, must shift and keep apace with changes in mobility, economics and labour markets. Macro-structural changes also animate a range of corollaries that exert an influence at multiple scales of action from the transnational through to the very local. For example, EU rules on free labour movement drove down the cost of intra-continental flights, opening new frontiers for access and exploitation. The repeated identification of key offenders in the UK-Romania trafficking activities analysed in Chapter 4 as they transited London Stansted airport, principal home of UK budget airlines operations, is particularly telling.
