João Paulo Cruz

Speak Out - Child Labor Trafficking

June 22nd, 2022

Child Labor Trafficking: Childhood Terror

It's widely known that child labor and human trafficking are terrible, inhumane things that
no one deserves to go through, but as much as it is pressing issue, people don't seem to be
taking enough measures to unmask and stop it. Many people may think that these two vicious
crimes have very little in common, but the reality of that couldn't be more different, and that
is because child labor trafficking exists. Child labor ties into human trafficking because the
children are not only being forced to work, but also being forced to abandon their homes and
move somewhere else, which combined with the oppressive work they have to do, causes
them immense emotional trauma.
Firstly, the laws regarding these crimes need to be discussed. The laws for child labor are
horrendously outdated, not being updated since the Depression, in 1929. This allows things
like children as young as 12 years old to work unlimited hours on agricultural activities
(Patel), which is an enormous loophole for criminals of the current age who run large scale
agricultural operations, like the harvesting of cotton and marijuana, that favors children for
the work because their delicate hands that are less likely to damage the goods. On the subject
of human trafficking, more loopholes are found, especially in the Internet. Most cases of
human trafficking involve the production and sale of private content from victims in websites
that accpecpt third party content, one of the most famous being Backpage, which reportadly
is involved in neraly three quarters of online child sex trafficking ("HUMAN
TRAFFICKING AND THE LEGAL LOOPHOLE"). The loophole these sort of sites use is in
the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that states: "No provider or user of an
interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information
provided by another information content provider" ("Section 230 Of The Communications
Decency Act"), which means that this law enacted in 1996, still during the rise of the Internet,
grants internet service providers immunity from responsibility for third party content on their
websites ("HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND THE LEGAL LOOPHOLE"). These loopholes
may look nothing alike at first glance, but if we look more deeply into it, we can see that they
can be used together, as an example, a child could be trafficked and forced by the trafficker to
work on a cotton farm while they’re sexually exploited by them, and this content being sold
via sites like Backpage.
In addition to faulty laws, lack of police awareness and outdated systems of identifying
child labor also contribute to the factor of the inefficiency of the prevention of child labor
trafficking. First of all, most victims encounter systems that fail to identify them as vicitims
of child labor trafficking. This happens because law enforcement troops, federal and
especially local, do not have a update and necessary training to distinguish child labor
traficking from child sex trafficking (Kaufka Walts). General misinformation about the topic
of child labor trafficking and child sex trafficking can get caught up in the training of police
officers who should be able to tell that they’re distinct and need diffrent ways to be taken care
of. A common piece of misinformation that is spread is that they are always related to each
other, which is completely incorrect. In a case of child labor trafficking, the main point of the
child’s illegal servitude is to complete an assignment that has to do with some sort of work,
more commonly agricultural or industrial; and in a case of child sex trafficking, the main
point of the child’s illegal servitude is to provide sexual services. These two are commonly
intertwined, but not always, which just begins to show how complex the poliece treatment to
child labor trafficking cases and victims should be and how lacking it currently is.
As a result of these outdated systems, a child rarely escapes their conditions of being a
victim of child labor trafficking, and the few ones who do escape, are not met with good
conditions outside the trafficking eviroment. This mostly happens because of the physical and
emotional trauma that the victims go through for, sometimes, several years. Because children
are more naive, most times, they are heavily manipulated and brainwashed into a bond with
their traffickers, which can cause heavy trauma. The book “A Little Life” by Hanya
Yanagihara can be used to exemplify this situation since the main character, Jude, is
manipulated by his trafficker into having a romantic bond with him too early into his life.
Jude’s example in the book has more to do with sex trafficking than labor, but the
consequences of the relationship with the trafficker can be the same in both cases. After Jude
gets out of the trafficker's hold, he can’t pursue a normal life, because he always has a
constant reminder of the traumas his trafficker brought to surface, like incentive to self-harm
and depression. This also affected Jude’s love life, since his old relationship distorted his
sense of sex and romance. Although this case is fictional, it can be applied into real life, and
it happens a lot. Another thing that happens, both to the book’s protagonist and to child labor
trafficking victims in real life, is severe physical consequences. If a child with an
underdeveloped body is forced to carry a lot of weight daily, it can contribute to the
underdevelopment of important parts of the human body like the spine, and children who
work in farms could potentially suffer from severe diseases by inhaling chemical substances
like pesticides (these diseases can vary from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung
cancer), and also suffer from skin cancer later on in their lives because of long periods of
unprotected exposure to the sun.
As can be seen, child labor is heavily intertwined with human trafficking because of several
loopholes in old laws, that are in severe need of updating, and the lack of care about updating
these laws by the Federal Power and the outdated methods of training provided to the police
are one of the great causes of why more children aren't taken out of the labor trafficking
enviroment and whisked away to a safer place where they can recover from emotional and
physical trauma. And although it all sounds difficult, it could be summed up in a very simple
manner: If the people in power of the laws don't take action right now, child labor trafficking
will only grow, and more and more children will have the most important period of their lives
stolen from them.

WORKS CITED
"HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND THE LEGAL LOOPHOLE". Freiwaldlaw.Com, 2022,
https://freiwaldlaw.com/crime-victims/human-trafficking-and-the-legal-loophole.

Kaufka Walts, Katherine. "Child Labor Trafficking In The United States: A Hidden Crime". Loyola
University Chicago, 2022.
Patel, Avni. "Study: U.S. Fails To Protect Kids From The Dangers Of Farmwork". ABC News, 2022,
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/study-us-fails-protect-kids-dangers-farmwork/story?id=1057371
7#:~:text=An%20exemption%20to%20federal%20child,exempt%20from%20minimum%20age%2
0requirements.

"Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act". Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2022,
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230#:~:text=Section%20230%20says%20that%20%22No,%C2%A7
%20230).

YANAGIHARA, HANYA. LITTLE LIFE. PICADOR, 2015.