Child Trafficking, Youth Labour Mobility

and the Politics of Protection 1st

Edition Neil Howard (Auth.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/child-trafficking-youth-labour-mobility-and-the-politics-
of-protection-1st-edition-neil-howard-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

Financialization New Investment Funds and Labour An

International Comparison 1st Edition Howard Gospel

https://textbookfull.com/product/financialization-new-investment-
funds-and-labour-an-international-comparison-1st-edition-howard-
gospel/

Anthropological Perspectives on Student Futures: Youth

and the Politics of Possibility 1st Edition Amy
Stambach

https://textbookfull.com/product/anthropological-perspectives-on-
student-futures-youth-and-the-politics-of-possibility-1st-
edition-amy-stambach/

Safeguarding and Child Protection Linking Theory and

Practice Jennie Lindon

https://textbookfull.com/product/safeguarding-and-child-
protection-linking-theory-and-practice-jennie-lindon/
The Wiley Handbook of What Works in Child Maltreatment:
An Evidence-Based Approach to Assessment and
Intervention in Child Protection 1st Edition Louise
Dixon
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-wiley-handbook-of-what-
works-in-child-maltreatment-an-evidence-based-approach-to-
assessment-and-intervention-in-child-protection-1st-edition-
louise-dixon/

Young People in the Labour Market Past Present Future

Youth Young Adulthood and Society 1st Edition Andy
Furlong

https://textbookfull.com/product/young-people-in-the-labour-
market-past-present-future-youth-young-adulthood-and-society-1st-
edition-andy-furlong/

We Gather Together The Religious Right and the Problem

of Interfaith Politics 1st Edition Neil J. Young

https://textbookfull.com/product/we-gather-together-the-
religious-right-and-the-problem-of-interfaith-politics-1st-
edition-neil-j-young/

Between Politics and Antipolitics: Thinking About

Politics After 9/11 1st Edition Dick Howard (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/between-politics-and-
antipolitics-thinking-about-politics-after-9-11-1st-edition-dick-
howard-auth/

The child protection practice manual : training

practitioners how to safeguard children 1st Edition
Fertleman

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-child-protection-practice-
manual-training-practitioners-how-to-safeguard-children-1st-
edition-fertleman/
PALGRAVE STUDIES ON CHILDREN AND DEVELOPMENT

Child Trafficking, Youth

Labour Mobility and the
Politics of Protection

Neil Howard
Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

Series Editors
Michael Bourdillon
University of Zimbabwe
Harare, Zimbabwe

Jo Boyden
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK

Roy Huijsmans
Erasmus University Rotterdam
The Netherlands
The series focuses on the interface between childhood studies and inter-
national development. Children and young people often feature as targets
of development or are mobilized as representing the future in debates on
broader development problems such as climate change. Increased atten-
tion to children in international development policy and practice is also
fuelled by the near universally ratified United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child and the recently adopted Sustainable Development
Goals.
Nonetheless, relatively little has been written on how the experience
of childhood and youth is shaped by development as well as how young
people as social actors negotiate, appropriate or even resist development
discourses and practices. Equally, the increased emphasis in research on
children and young people’s voices, lived experiences and participation has
yet to impact policy and practice in substantial ways.
This series brings together cutting-edge research presented in a variety
of forms, including monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot
format; and so furthers theoretical, conceptual and policy debates situated
on the interface of childhood and international development. The series
includes a mini-series from Young Lives, a unique 15-year longitudinal
study of child childhood poverty in developing countries. A particular
strength of the series is its inter-disciplinary approach and its emphasis on
bringing together material that links issues from developed and develop-
ing countries, as they affect children and young people. The series will
present original and valuable new knowledge for an important and grow-
ing field of scholarship.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14569
 Neil Howard

Child Trafficking,
Youth Labour
Mobility and the
Politics of Protection
Neil Howard
Institute of Development Policy and Management
European University Institute in Florence, Italy

Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

ISBN 978-1-137-47817-7    ISBN 978-1-137-47818-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47818-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958280

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © FogStock / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For my mum and dad
 Foreword

This provocative study concerns the migration of many adolescent chil-

dren in Benin to seek employment away from home, sometimes across
international borders. At issue is whether their mobility, which is assisted
by adults, constitutes “trafficking”, and what, if anything, should be done
about it. Opinion about that is divided. Whereas family and community
regard youthful migration for work to be safe and appropriate, even laud-
able for young persons under the circumstances of limited local opportu-
nity, international child protection and advocacy groups have labelled it a
form of trafficking or even slavery, and energetically oppose it. Which is it,
and whose view should prevail?
This careful ethnographic investigation collects and analyses differing
stakeholder perspectives on the issue, ranging from children and their
families to their employers to government regulators to national and
international anti-trafficking activists. The story that emerges is only in
part the expectable anthropologist’s tale of naturally differing points of
view and resultant misunderstandings. Beyond that lies a far more dis-
turbing account, one of wilful ignorance and misleading representation of
the issues by international community (outsiders) seeking to impose their
pre-packaged assumptions, doctrines, agendas and action objectives on
people and situations they do not understand or even care to understand.
The resulting tale is less one of democratic change that achieves agreement
about what needs to be done than it is one of a new social order foisted
upon a community and its children from the outside by raw institutional
and political power. In this case, according to the book, what is imposed is
a policy misfit that does not respond either to the facts of the situation or

vii
viii FOREWORD

to what the children and community feel is needed and would be helpful.
It leaves them worse off.
By what authority did the government and international organisations
in this story feel justified to unilaterally impose an inappropriate solution
to a questionably diagnosed problem that may not even exist? Those pol-
icy actors flew the banner of children’s human rights, which are principles
and standards based on theoretical notions of a universal childhood that
nowhere exists, that nobody understands very well, but that everyone is
expected to accept. There was no like banner for the wishes and aspi-
rations of the real children, or the child-rearing values and practices of
their families and communities. One might even wonder whether the well-­
being and development of living, breathing, flesh-and-blood children in
Benin were not sacrificed to a theoretically abstract notion of universal
childhood cooked up in Geneva by people who had not the slightest idea
of these African children’s reality, hopes and challenges. Are these glo-
balised dicta to be followed no matter what, regardless of the human cost?
Is this not really about the triumph of principle over people? Is that how
we are supposed to protect children, by extending centrally defined defini-
tions, concepts and rules into every city, village and household?
The implications of this case study are no less than a scorching general
critique of the imperious manner by which the international community
too often goes about promoting the protection of children. Neil’s picture
is ugly, but from the viewpoint of my three decades of engagement with
international child protection policy, it rings very true. Its criticisms apply
to me just as they do to many colleagues in this line of work. I saw my
own face too often in an embarrassing light to enjoy the book without
wincing, but also often enough to know that I need to pay attention to
it. We all do. Its unflattering portrayal of misguided interventions born of
ethnocentric groupthink, self-righteously ignoring field evidence and the
voices of children and families, is a rude come-down from how we child
protection professionals would largely prefer to regard ourselves. After all,
if we are here to save children, how can we be leaving them worse rather
than better off? But too often we are.
What I find most embarrassing about Neil’s account of ideologically
limited and practically inept child-savers is its suggestion that we ‘experts’
may not always know what we are doing. We know what we think we are
doing, of course, but that is not the same thing. Aside from falling victim
to agency groupthink, the main reason we don’t know what we’re doing is
that we don’t do our homework, or at least don’t do it well enough. We are
 FOREWORD ix

too often reluctant to put enough time and effort into understanding the
people and situations we mean to address and into evaluating our inter-
ventions to learn their outcomes in children’s lives. We need to do both
of these things a darn sight more than we do. There are always excuses for
why we don’t: that kind of work is just too expensive and inconvenient
and doesn’t fit our project time frame, or it goes into “unproductive”
research rather than actually serving people. But when we skimp on situa-
tion analysis, full consultation with children and communities, and rigor-
ous evaluation, thereby not getting the essential facts right, we operate in
wilful ignorance. Ignorance negates accountability and thereby calls the
ethics of our action into doubt.
Ethics are at the heart of the matter. How can it be ethical to intervene
disruptively in other people’s lives when we are unable or unwilling to
understand the many ramifications of who they are and what we are about
in dealing with them? How can it be moral to invade their daily existence
without invitation and then not ascertain the results of our incursions and
accept responsibility for them? Neil’s sad tale of misguided and ideologi-
cally un-reflexive anti-trafficking activities pursued by well-meaning but
clueless and insufficiently caring international agencies invites serious ethi-
cal doubt. That moral challenge extends to many corners of child protec-
tion policy. And we need to face it.
This book is especially timely because it comes at a moment when it
seems to some of us in the field that the international child protection
system is falling apart. The evidence is everywhere. The media remind
us daily that our emergency capacity to deal with displaced and refugee
children fleeing violence has been so utterly overwhelmed that it flounders
in chaos, lacking the political and financial support necessary to meet the
need. As I write, a coalition of roughly a hundred academic and prac-
titioner child labour experts is struggling to convince the international
community that its most hallowed child labour policy—a legal minimum
age for entrance to work—has been demonstrated by research and experi-
ence to harm children rather than benefit them. That this kind of ‘protec-
tion’ increases harm. A similar situation exists in the field of child abuse
and neglect, where the globally diffused ‘protective’ idea of moving chil-
dren from their homes into foster facilities has turned out to poorly pro-
tect most children and to further traumatise many of them. To take still
another example, in many parts of the world, physical and psychological
maltreatment of children in schools is a major problem not only affect-
ing the school attendance and achievement of the children involved, but
x FOREWORD

also undermining their health and development. It has proved resistant

to control. Child protection policy has hardly begun to grapple in serious
ways with new and building twenty-first-century threats to children, such
as the effects of climate change, which is predicted to worsen into a full
emergency with children as its main victims.
If our present international protection policies based on globalised
norms that are ensconced in law are not working well, what other
approaches might be tried? What if we worked the other way round, start-
ing with real children in their specific contexts, making sure that every
child is identified and systematically followed, then aggregating from the
specific to the general to determine how to support diverse initiatives with
our considerable resources?
What if in Benin the original concern and project starting point had
been not a pre-packaged assumption of child trafficking to be abolished,
but a desire to promote the well-being and development of children and
youth in this especially impoverished area? Would that not have led logi-
cally to social and economic improvements creating more local oppor-
tunity and reducing the need for youth to migrate, coupled, of course,
with politicised critiques of the structural forces creating and sustaining
‘poverty’? What if anti-trafficking efforts centred on labour inspection to
reduce exploitation and work hazards, thus ensuring the safety and fair
treatment of young workers who did still need to migrate to find a job?
Surely this would have been better? And surely that is why children and
communities called for this as an alternative policy of protection?
What does it say about the international child protection community
that it did not seriously respond to the requests of children and communi-
ties? What would it take to create an international child protection system
that could reverse its priorities, starting from the concerns of children and
communities, and mobilising international rules and resources to meet
local needs? What kind of system would put principle at the service of
people? This is what we need to see emerge.

William Myers
 Acknowledgements

I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people for helping to make this book
happen.
Financially, I’m grateful to the UK’s Economic and Social Research
Council as well as to the EU’s Marie Curie Actions for doctoral and post-
doctoral fellowships, respectively. St Antony’s College, St Hilda’s College,
the Scatcherd Foundation and Oxford’s Department of International
Development also helped a great deal, as did the EUI’s Migration Policy
Centre, where I finished the manuscript.
At Palgrave, the patience and support shown by Cristina Brian and
Amber Husain have been very welcome indeed (I submitted two years
late!), while the series editors—Jo Boyden, Michael Bourdillon and Roy
Huijsmans—have been engaging, encouraging and generally all-round
lovely.
To Jo Boyden, in particular, I owe a special debt of thanks, since she,
along with Bridget Anderson, also took on the daunting task of supervis-
ing the doctorate on which much of this book is based. Bridget and Jo are
two seriously inspirational women, and their grace, patience, guidance and
occasional well-placed bashings were all absolutely essential.
Julia O’Connell Davidson too has helped me grow intellectually a great
deal—first as my PhD examiner, then as my friend and most recently as my
collaborator on Open Democracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS).
Perhaps more than anyone, she has shown me that it is possible to be an
established academic and still be cool.
The rest of my team at BTS have also been wonderful comrades and
public intellectual partners over the past two years during which this book

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

has developed, and so Cameron Thibos, Genevieve LeBaron, Joel Quirk,

Samuel Okyere and Prabha Kotiswaran, thank you all.
There have been a lot of friendships and a great deal of love on this
journey, starting in particular in Oxford’s famous Development Studies
‘Loft.’ I cannot imagine a more collegial or supportive environment for
conducting research, and the more-than-friendships I made there were
a gift. In no particular order, James Morrissey, Jeffrey French, Daniel
Altschuler, Narae Choi, Nadiya Figueroa, Elise Klein, Rebecca Brubaker,
Alex Löwe, Lynn Carr, Abby Hardgrove, Taylor St-John, Maria Mancilla-­
Garcia, Cameron Thibos, Indrajit Roy, Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock, Liz
Chatterjee, Kate Orkin and Joel Lazarus…thank you.
Out of Oxford too, there are many to whom I owe much. My extensive
fieldwork (and not-so-fieldwork) peregrinations would have been a lot
lonelier and a lot less filling had it not been for some special souls: Natasha
Chichilnisky-Heal (who is dearly missed), Vanessa Greco and Noah Herz-­
Bunzl in New York; Jamie Chosak in many places; Wilis Djissou, Gracia
Koyo, Patrick Butler, Norbert Fanou-Ako and his family in Benin; Sverre
Molland in Canberra; Katharina Lenner, Rasmus Hoffman and Janina
Knuth in Florence.
There are a number of institutions too that I am grateful to, for open-
ing themselves to me as I conducted my research, and for the ‘bigness’
they showed in keeping me around even as they learned that I was critical
of their failings. UNICEF, the ILO, UNODC and many more: I hope
your staff will be able to read this in the spirit in which it is intended, as
friendly, constructive critique, mixed with a large dash of empathy.
Almost finally, and for miscellaneous goodness over the last many years:
Karin Heissler, who has shown me that one can remain in the system and
still stay sane; Helga Konrad, who has been wonderfully open and sup-
portive ever since our first meeting; Mike Dottridge, who was possibly
the very first person I spoke to about this research and who has never
been anything but available and an ally; Olivier Feneyrol, Jean-Luc Imhof
and Susu Thatun, who all opened important doors; and Bill Myers, for
his always-infectious enthusiasm and kindness, and for agreeing to write
the Foreword to this book.
Finally, my family. My mum, Margaret Howard, my dad, Philip Howard,
and my sister, Jennifer Howard, are very much the reasons I am here.
They have loved, supported and encouraged me, and they have backed
my work no matter how far away it took me. As, of course, have Asha and
Rumi: I love you both dearly; thank you.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii

They tell me that a book is supposed to be more than the sum of its
parts and a novel contribution to the world. If mine is either, then it
is largely due to those mentioned earlier. Where it is neither, the fault
remains my own.
Florence, May 2016
 Contents

1 Introduction: Child Trafficking and Its Discontents 1

2 The Dominant Paradigm: Child Trafficking and the Fight

Against It 29

3 Challenging the Paradigm: Young People at Work

and on the Move 65

4 Explaining the Paradigm: Inside the Anti-­trafficking Field 97

5 Drawing Conclusions 129

Appendix A: Table of Interviewees 135

Appendix B: Interview Schedules 147

Appendix C: Text of Benin’s Anti-­trafficking Law 157

Bibliography 165

Index 175

xv
 List of Figures

Map 1.1 Benin within West Africa (Map available at and downloaded
from: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:LocationBenin.svg.
Last accessed 12/02/16)7
Map 1.2 Benin (Map available at and downloaded from: http://fr.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Benin_carte.png. Last accessed
12/02/16)8
Map 1.3 Zou Department (Map available at and downloaded from:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Benin_Zou.png. Last
accessed 12/02/16)9
Map 1.4 Comunes of the Zou Department, including Za-Kpota
and Zogbodomey (Map available at and downloaded from:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Zou_communes.png.
Last accessed 12/02/16)10
Map 1.5 Location of Abeokuta (Map available at and downloaded from:
http://www.worldatlas.com/img/locator/city/083/14983-
abeokuta-locator-map.jpg. Last accessed 12/02/16)11
Fig. 2.1 Anti-trafficking Poster 1 (This and all other photographs in
this book are copyright of the author) 50
Fig. 2.2 Anti-trafficking Poster 2 51
Fig. 2.3 Roadside school promotion poster 52
Fig. 4.1 The symbolic and economic capital trade-off 119

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Child Trafficking and Its

Discontents

Introduction
This book charts the chequered history of an idea—child trafficking—
which rose to prominence in the late 1990s and for a decade came to
dominate the field of international child protection. Although the word
‘history’ may seem somewhat premature, in reality, the child trafficking
star is on the wane, and eventually it will die out. When it does, we will be
able to look back on its arc as an instructive example of how social prob-
lematics are created, sustained and ultimately replaced; how these shape
individual and institutional trajectories; and how they at once reflect and
recreate our governing ideologies.
My own child trafficking ‘career’ closely parallels that of the idea itself.
In the early 1990s, nobody knew trafficking was a ‘thing,’ and I was no
different. By the start of the 2000s, it was well on its way to becoming
a major transnational issue, and I began to volunteer. The middle of the
decade saw it established as the key question for child rights organisations
and their donors, and a whole institutional universe was built or recon-
figured around it. I began working for a small African non-governmental
organisation (NGO), then a bigger international one and finally for the
United Nations (UN). This was when—in the mid to late 2000s—the first
seeds of doubt were sewn. ‘Do these stories make sense? Is it really like
this?’ Academics and practitioners began questioning the dominant nar-
rative, challenging the politics. Increasingly, dissenting voices were heard,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

N. Howard, Child Trafficking, Youth Labour Mobility and the
Politics of Protection, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47818-4_1
2 N. HOWARD

caveats were introduced and projects were disbanded. Now, a decade later,
fewer and fewer people can see what all the fuss was about. Scholars have
deconstructed certain of the problematic assumptions, civil society has
incorporated a little critical and culturally sensitive rhetoric, and some of
the money at least has gone elsewhere.
So what, then, is the point of telling this (hi)story? Is it even worth
it? I believe that it is. For two important reasons. The first is empirical.
For 10 years, child trafficking was the defining issue for a whole network
of Northern donor agencies, Southern government departments, UN
bodies and a universe of NGOs. It led to institutional interventions
across the globe, carved multilateral channels through which billions
of dollars flowed and shaped (and in many cases seriously harmed) lives
on every continent. Although some have told certain parts of this story,
none have brought all of its threads together. The second reason is illus-
trative, in that what has happened with and through child trafficking
can tell us a lot about how the wider world works, and in whose inter-
ests. It speaks to major political questions, including ‘Who decides what
constitutes a social problem’? ‘How are “moral panics” born’? ‘How do
these interact with “development” or “child protection”’? ‘What is the
relationship between ideas, power and money’? This book will try to
respond to these questions, as well as to pose many others, using child
trafficking as its lens.
The book seeks to provide the first overarching, empirically grounded,
critical analysis of child trafficking as idea, ordering principle and artefact
of politics. It examines (once) hegemonic anti- child trafficking discourse,
policy and practice, and does so by placing secondary literature from
around the world in conversation with my own paradigmatic case study
of the situation in southern Benin. The book begins with a presentation
of what I characterise as ‘the child trafficking paradigm,’ including main-
stream institutional representations of what it is and conventional policy
or project approaches to dealing with it. Next, it problematises these by
contrasting them with what I term ‘the alternative empirical realities’ of
non-Western child/youth labour and mobility. Finally, it goes ‘inside’ the
anti-trafficking field in order to explain the existence, persistence of and
resistance to the dominant trafficking paradigm. In doing so, it draws on
my many years of work and research with the major organisations compris-
ing this field.
I argue, first, that dominant child trafficking discourse labels as traf-
ficking what would more profitably be understood as ‘child fosterage’ or
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 3

‘teenage labour migration.’ It does this in part because of the received ideas
structuring the thinking of those in the field. Second, I critique the policy
interventions consequent to this labelling, on the grounds that they fail to
account for the socio-cultural or political–economic conditions structuring
the lives into which they intervene. Third, I seek to account for this unhappy
state of affairs. In doing so, I offer an interpretation that is more systemic
than those emphasising the ignorance or malevolence of political and insti-
tutional actors inside or with influence over the anti-­trafficking field.
My interpretation draws on the insights of post-structuralist discourse
theory, political anthropology, development ethnography and studies of
ideology. I argue that the creation and institutionalisation of both child
trafficking as problematic and anti- child trafficking as policy toolkit must
be viewed through the lens of the structuring power of three framing
ideologies—‘Western Childhood,’ ‘Neoliberalism’ and the ‘Ideal State.’
Each intertwines with the others to shape both what child trafficking can
mean and what can be done about it. They limit what can be seen, said and
done, delineating the space within which institutional actors can interpret,
represent and act. When anti-trafficking discourse and policy are decon-
structed, these three ideologies leave a clear and present trace. And when
the child trafficking star will finally have set, their afterglow will unfortu-
nately surely remain.

Child trafficking began its journey to social prominence in the mid to late
1990s. It rose on the back of a sharp increase in funding for, media atten-
tion to, and political discourse around the previous ‘it’ issues of (adult) sex
trafficking, child labour and child sexual abuse. These spiked in the wake
of the 1989 adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
and in 1992 led to the establishment of the International Programme on
the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC). IPEC quickly became the cen-
trepiece of a well-resourced and discursively powerful global movement to
get children out of work and into school. In 1996, it helped launch the
World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and
in 2000 fought for the adoption of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children.
The ‘Palermo Protocol,’ as this document became known, marked
the official inauguration of trafficking as international cause célèbre. The
years following its adoption saw an explosion of anti-trafficking rhetoric,
4 N. HOWARD

legal action, project money and media stories. Organisations dedicated

to the anti-trafficking fight mushroomed from a few to many thousand
(Kempadoo et al. 2005: xxix); anti-trafficking literature proliferated1;
national policy frameworks spread worldwide (Cho et al. 2011); and fund-
ing rose from the paltry to the billions.2
During this period, child trafficking came to be understood as a question
of innocent and unsuspecting minors kidnapped and enslaved by criminal
exploiters, or sold by desperate and irresponsible parents. The dominant
discourse constructed both a child’s migration and her work as inherently
problematic, resulting exclusively from pathological cause-­ factors includ-
ing poverty and the corruption of traditional practices. Mainstream policy
responses correspondingly tended towards the draconian, paralleling efforts
to end child labour by pre-emptively targeting the work equated with traf-
ficking or the migration seen to lead to it. The international legal architecture
defining the crime combined the Palermo Protocol with the International
Labour Organisation’s Minimum Age and Worst Forms of Child Labour
conventions (ILO 1973, 1999). In doing so, it constructed child trafficking
as different from adult trafficking in three critical respects. These were (1)
that coercion or deception were unnecessary for an exploitative act to con-
stitute child trafficking; (2) that a minor’s consent to exploitative labour was
irrelevant and legally impossible; and (3) that exploitation was defined more
broadly than in the case of adults, to include all work deemed by the com-
petent authorities to ‘harm the health, safety, or morals of young persons.’

Extract 1.1: Definitional Elements of Child Trafficking3

Child trafficking: Elements defined for the purpose of IPEC operations:

• A child—a person under the age of 18 years;

• ‘Acts’ of recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt,
whether by force or not, by a third person or group;
• The third person or group organizes the recruitment and/or these
other acts for exploitative purposes;
• Movement may not be a constituent element for trafficking in so
far as law enforcement and prosecution is concerned. However, an
element of movement within a country or across borders is needed—
even if minimal—in order to distinguish trafficking from other forms
of slavery and slave-like practices enumerated in Art 3 (a) of ILO
Convention No. 182 (C182), and ensure that trafficking victims
away from their families do get needed assistance.
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 5

• Exploitation includes:

(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, debt bond-

age and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including
forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in
armed conflict (C182, Art. 3(a));
(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for
the production of pornography or for pornographic perfor-
mances (C182, Art. 3(b));
(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in
particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as
defined in the relevant international treaties (C182, Art.
3(c));
(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is
carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of
children (C182, Art. 3(d) and C138, Art. 3);
(e) work done by children below the minimum age for admission
to employment (C138,Art. 2 & 7).

• Threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud

or deception, or the abuse of power or a position of vulnerability at
any point of the recruitment and movement do not need to be pres-
ent in case of children (other than with adults), but are nevertheless
strong indications of child trafficking.

Although we shall examine the implications of this paradigm in the

forthcoming chapters, let us note now that it engendered a rising tide of
critique. Scholars from all continents complained that it was problematic
and reductive, with policy in turn misguided and ineffective. Criticism tar-
geted the simplistic, culturally imperialist tenor of prevailing narratives, as
well as the damaging, depoliticised nature of policy and prevention strat-
egies. Researchers took pains to emphasise the consent that supposedly
trafficked children did offer for their work and movement, as well as the
socio-cultural context within which this took place.
Less quick to emerge, however, has been a convincing academic account
of how and why the anti-trafficking establishment could get it all so wrong.
Two critical scholarly assumptions have been widespread. First, that anti-­
traffickers were ignorant and unable to understand the complex realities
they depicted and acted upon. Second, that this was chiefly conditioned
6 N. HOWARD

by the ethnocentric received ideas they had about what childhood is and
should be. Neither of these explanations is entirely without merit, as this
book will go on to show. But alone they are insufficient. For they do
not account for anti-traffickers whose understanding is nuanced beyond
received ideas about childhood, nor for those whose understanding is lim-
ited by other received ideas not pertaining to childhood. They are also
unable to do justice to the many inter- and intra-institutional complexities
structuring (life inside) the anti-trafficking field. It will be the purpose of
much of this book to do just that.

To Benin and Back in Search of How and Why

My research into the whys and wherefores of the anti- child trafficking
world took me from Vienna to New York via Abeokuta, Bohicon, Cotonou
and Geneva. On the way, I spoke to anti-trafficking actors stationed all
over the globe, at nearly every level of the policy chain. I chose Benin as
my case study country for a number of reasons. The first was practical: I
had previously worked in Cotonou for an anti-trafficking NGO and so
enjoyed a head-start when investigating the field. Second, Benin had long
been identified as a child trafficking hotbed. It earned this status after the
infamous discovery of a ship smuggling supposed Beninese ‘child slaves’
to Gabon in 2001 and the 2003 rescue of more apparent child slaves from
the quarries of Abeokuta in Nigeria. Third, my previous experience in
Benin had shown that discourse and policy there closely resembled those
critiqued elsewhere. Discourse constructed children’s work and migration
as inherently and unambiguously exploitative and thus as equivalent to
trafficking, while policy sought to protect the young by pre-emptively pre-
venting their labour mobility. Fourth, Benin had a socio-cultural heritage
of child and youth mobility as well as a political economy that made it ger-
mane for examining the contrasts and conflicts entailed in transplanting
a (depoliticised) Western model of child protection into a non-Western
context.4 And fifth, Benin’s anti-trafficking field was comprised of all of
the world’s most important anti- child trafficking organisations.
I decided to begin by examining one of the country’s ‘classic’ examples
of child trafficking—the movement of teenage boys from the southern Zou
region to the artisanal quarries of Abeokuta, Nigeria (see Maps 1.1–1.5
below). I selected four case study villages from Za-Kpota and Zogbodomey
communes, and in these villages I purposively sampled current and former
migrants to the quarries, individuals involved in the migrant labour network
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 7

linking the region to the quarries, and village authorities. Fieldwork here
took place in multiple stages: six months in 2010 and another in 2012.5 My
­principal research tools were semi-structured, open-ended interviews and
focus group discussions, along with as much participant observation as pos-
sible. Subsequently, I spent one month in 2012 and my research assistant
spent two months in 2014 in and around the Abeokutan quarries, in order
to triangulate what we had heard on the Beninese side of the border. There
we observed the living and working conditions of young workers and
interviewed migrant labourers and other key actors in the quarry economy.
From the ground level, I moved upward to access the various different
organisations shaping discourse, policy and practice around my case study
population. Identifying which agencies to talk to was unproblematic, since
Benin possesses a formalised national child protection network. Members
include, from the UN and International Organisation (IO) world, the
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations
Organisation on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International
Labour Organisation (ILO); from the donor community, the United
States (US) Departments of State, Labor and International Development,
the European Union (EU), France, and the Danish International

Map 1.1 Benin within West Africa (Map available at and downloaded from:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:LocationBenin.svg. Last accessed 12/02/16)
8 N. HOWARD

Map 1.2 Benin (Map available at and downloaded from: http://fr.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Fichier:Benin_carte.png. Last accessed 12/02/16)
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 9

Map 1.3 Zou Department (Map available at and downloaded from: http://fr.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Benin_Zou.png. Last accessed 12/02/16)
 10
N. HOWARD

Map 1.4 Comunes of the Zou Department, including Za-Kpota and Zogbodomey (Map available at and downloaded
from: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Zou_communes.png. Last accessed 12/02/16)
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 11

Map 1.5 Location of Abeokuta (Map available at and downloaded from: http://
www.worldatlas.com/img/locator/city/083/14983-abeokuta-locator-map.jpg.
Last accessed 12/02/16)

Development Agency; the Beninese Family and Justice Ministries; and a

collection of national and international NGOs.
As all of these are corporate structures organised hierarchically across
time and space, research focussed both on external interactions and on
multi-level intra-institutional dynamics. In the case of the state, this meant
study at central and regional/local levels. In Cotonou, where ministry
headquarters are located, I interviewed senior civil servants working on
the trafficking or related briefs, spoke to current and former government
ministers, and took pains to access any non-interview data that could shed
light on institutional functioning. The same was true at regional and com-
munal levels, as indeed it was with relevant NGOs, including those with
whom I maintained an ongoing working relationship.
It was with donors and UN agencies, however, that my research moved
beyond Benin to address the international anti-trafficking hierarchy. This
involved complementing the study of Benin-based anti-traffickers with a
study of those whose institutional positionality meant that they had influ-
ence over what happened in Benin. In 2009, I conducted six months of par-
ticipant observation at UNICEF headquarters in New York, two months
of face-to-face interviews with ILO (and especially IPEC) staff in Geneva,
12 N. HOWARD

telephone interviews with donor agency employees in capitals across the

Global North and visits to UNODC in Vienna. I thus managed to access
a large slice of what Adler and Haas would term the global a­ nti-­trafficking
‘epistemic community’ (1992), or what sociologists and the anthropolo-
gists of policy would call the anti- child trafficking ‘field’ (e.g. Shore et al.
2011). In doing so, I focused on how and why policies and projects are
established and represented, the nature of the institutional research pro-
cess, inter- and intra-institutional dynamics and constraints, understand-
ings of childhood, child work and migration, perspectives on trafficking
and anti-trafficking policy, views on the role of the state, obstacles to its
successful operation and perceptions of ideology.
In total, I interviewed more than 300 people over a combined period
of nearly three full years of research and have since continued to work with
many of them, sharing my analyses of how, why and what they do. The
discussion that follows will reflect this ongoing dialogue, which interested
readers can make further sense of by consulting the table of interview-
ees in Appendix A and breakdown of indicative interview questions in
Appendix B.6

Theoretical Bearings
How will it reflect that dialogue? And what theoretical resources will be of
use as it unfolds? This book weaves together a number of different theo-
retical threads, each drawing broadly on the post-structuralist tradition.
These threads include Bourdieu’s sociology, Howarth’s discourse theory,
post-Marxist studies of hegemony and ideology, Foucauldian studies of
governmentality, the anthropology of policy, migration studies and the
sociology of childhood. All offer a handful of core concepts critical to the
forthcoming discussion.
The first is discourse. In post-structuralist thinking, ‘discourses are sys-
tems of meaningful practices that form the identities of subjects or objects,’
while ‘the discursive is a theoretical horizon in which the being of objects is
constituted’ (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 3). This does not imply that
‘everything is language’ or that the object world exists only in our minds.
Rather, it implies that the material exists independently of, but only has
meaning on, the plane of the discursive (Howarth 2013, Chapter 1). That
is to say, although the atoms you are holding remain an undeniable mate-
rial reality, their identification as ‘a book’ depends entirely on the symbolic
systems that give to this materiality that particular meaning.
 INTRODUCTION: CHILD TRAFFICKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS 13

Such an approach wholly de-essentialises meaning. It sees ‘a book’ as

‘a book’ not because the book possesses any transcendental ‘bookness,’
but because it is not ‘a pen,’ which is itself a signifying distinction only
for and within the social worlds that accept the existence of and difference
between pens and books. Meaning, in this understanding, is inescapably
and intrinsically relational. It is fixed only partially and through the opera-
tion of metaphor and metonym, sameness and difference.
Meaning is thus also everywhere an artefact of practice and social
consensus. If not inherent, it must be established intersubjectively,
with what something ‘is’ being socially accepted and recreated
through practice over time. In turn, this points to the structurality
of discourse. What something means governs both how we see it and
what we do with it. Meaning is recursively enacted in our language and
in the everyday practices governing our world. UNICEF, for example,
exists as a global institution not just because we share a particular
understanding of childhood, but through and as an expression of that
understanding.
Importantly, not all discourses are equal. Certain discourses carry more
weight, are more important and come with more structuring ‘baggage’
than others. The most important are typically called ideologies. I call dis-
courses ideologies when they are widely accepted, largely uncontested, of
determining importance for other lower-level discourses, and when they
naturalise and hide their own contingency (Žižek 1994b).7 Following
Laclau, I also see them as an ongoing achievement of hegemony. In Laclau’s
theorising, hegemony is not solely the mixture of coercion and consent
involved in stabilising a political order. Rather, it is the achievement of the
relative stability of meaning itself, through which any and every discourse,
ideology or coalition will be built (2001).
What role does power play within this framework? I make sense of
power using Bourdieu’s concept of ‘capital’.8 Capital, Bourdieu argues,
‘is a social relation of power’ that commonly comes in four generic forms
(Bourdieu 1986). These are ‘economic (money and property); cultural
(information, knowledge, and educational credentials); social (acquain-
tances and networks); and symbolic (legitimation, authority, prestige)’
(Swartz 2013: 34–5, emphasis added). Different actors within the social
field possess differential amounts of these different types of capital and use
them in the struggle to establish or challenge dominance, including over
meaning. A political actor may, for example, mobilise her social networks
in the press to promote a particular discourse in the public domain, or she
14 N. HOWARD

may simply buy advertising space to achieve the same end. In either case,
she deploys her capital in pursuit of her goals.
Although all capitals are important in the creation of meaning, sym-
bolic capital is the sine qua non. This is because symbolic capital denotes
the legitimacy or ‘credit’ invested in an actor by others, without which
that actor lacks the ‘believe-ability’ necessary to do anything at all. It
would, for example, be absurd for a politician to spend fortunes buying a
city’s billboards when the city has already discredited her as a liar. In that
instance, her stock of symbolic capital would be so low that her economic
capital loses all purchase, with the result that she can no longer ‘fix’ any
meaning. Symbolic capital is thus ‘the accumulated authority to be able to
exercise symbolic power,’ which is itself the ability to ‘name,’ to ‘impose…
meanings as legitimate’ and to ‘shape perceptions of social reality by
imposing cognitive categories through which we understand the social
world’ (Swartz 2013: 83–4). In this sense, it is the foundational, overarch-
ing form of capital, since it is ‘the form in which different forms of capital
are [themselves] recognised as legitimate’ (Atasü-Topcuoğlu 2015: 17).
How does this relate to structure and agency? And in what ways do
self and system interrelate? Although these twin concepts often represent
antagonistic poles in mainstream social theory, post-structuralists reject
either of the essentialist camps giving ontological priority to one over the
other (e.g. Žižek 1994a; Stavrakakis 1999; Glynos and Stavrakakis 2001;
Howarth 2013). They see structures and agents as requiring and overde-
termining each other and reject that either can attain ‘fullness’ or closure
at the other’s expense. Structures are seen as indeterminate, incomplete
phenomena made up of agents recursively enacting or reforming their
‘structure-ness,’ while agents are viewed as constitutively incomplete and
continually (re)shaped by the myriad criss-crossing contradictory struc-
tures they inhabit, recreate and resist.
Importantly, post-structuralists also break the agent into three interre-
lated but analytically distinct components. These are the subject, subjectiv-
ity and subject position. Subject positions can be understood as expressions
of the discourses and ideologies one inhabits, manifesting in relatively neat
correspondences between discursive–ideological structures and individual
thinking or behaviour (what Bourdieu would call ‘habitus’ under ‘doxa’
[Swartz 2013: 90]). Subjectivity, by contrast, is the moment when hab-
itus breaks down, when a crisis or disjuncture dislocates the structure,
reveals its incompletion and leaves the subject with a decision over what to
do (Critchley and Marchart 2004: 5). Crucially, the subject is compelled to
make this decision—it is ‘condemned to be free’ (Laclau in Howarth 2013:
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
opportunity to slay their game at noon, but are very apt to hide the
carcass and come back to devour it in the cool of the evening.

The products of fermentation are so repulsive to the higher animals

that only the distress of actual starvation would tempt a monkey to
touch a rotten apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-juice.
Poppy fields need no fence; tobacco leaves are in no danger of
being nibbled by browsing cattle. Nature seems to have had no
occasion for providing instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-
way things as certain mineral poisons; yet the taste of arsenic,
though not violently repulsive (like that of the more common, and
therefore more dangerous, vegetable poisons), is certainly not
attractive, but rather insipid, and a short experience seems to
supplement the defects of instinct in that respect. Trappers know that
poisoned baits after a while lose their seductiveness, and old rats
have been seen [59]driving their young from a dish of arsenic-
poisoned gruel.

Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination to seek arsenic

or alcohol for its own sake, and there is no reason to suppose that
man, in that respect, differs from every known species of his fellow-
creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers rant about “the lusts of
the unregenerate heart,” the “weakness of the flesh,” the “danger of
yielding to the promptings of appetite,” as if Nature herself would
tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety could be learned only
from preternatural revelation. But the truth is that to the palate of a
child, even the child of a habitual drunkard, the taste of alcohol is as
repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood. Tobacco fumes and the
stench of burning opium still nauseate the children of the habitual
smoker as they would have nauseated the children of the patriarchs.
The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by vertigo and
sick headaches; the first glass of beer is rejected by the revolt of the
stomach; the fauces contract and writhe against the first dram of
brandy. Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable
language of instinct, and only the repeated and continued disregard
of that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison-
thirst which clerical blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our
natural appetites. They might as well make us believe in a natural
passion for dungeon air, because the prisoners of the Holy
Inquisition at last lost their love of liberty and came to prefer the
stench of their subterranean [60]black-holes to the breezes of the free
mountains.

The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and such abominations
as fetid cheese and fermented cabbage have all to be artificially
acquired; and in regard to the selection of our proper food the
instincts of our young children could teach us more than a whole
library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the sake of “mortifying the flesh,”
but on the plain recommendation of the natural senses that prefer
palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam could be guided in
the path of reform and learn to avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms
of its forbidding taste.

[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that

the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To
let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the
befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take
all sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved
afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an
individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men.
He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a
runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a
mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a
man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling
disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means
limited [61]to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the half-
lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed toper.
Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food and
drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a
favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all
other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the
unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit,
and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are
founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers
with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance
prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone
the demon of life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest
tribulation: Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of
sunshine behind the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed
Circassian insurgents admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships,
and constant danger, their captors contrived to enjoy life better than
their enemies in the brandy-reeking abundance of their
headquarters. The myth of the Lotos-eaters described a nation of
vegetarians who passed life so pleasantly that visitors refused to
leave them, and renounced their native lands. The religion of
Mohammed makes abstinence from intoxicating drinks a chief duty
of a true believer, and that law alone has prevented the physical
degeneration of his followers. With all their mental sloth and the
enervating influence of their harem life, the Turks are still the finest
representatives of physical manhood. At the horse [62]fairs of
Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered, proud-eyed
rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of the
sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives. After
twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods of
luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian
conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior to
the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six
hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and
peace against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent
gave them no natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they
entered the arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in
an age of universal superstition made their country a garden of
science and industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and
philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles
their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of
their adversaries.

Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For
thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the
shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of
approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the
sixteenth century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses
till his physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he
resolved to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and
two of his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth
year; but [63]Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of
unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to
one-tenth of the usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely
sufficient to flavor a cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of
his new regimen he regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found
himself able to take long walks without fatigue, and could sleep
without being awakened by nightmare horrors. At the end of a year
all the symptoms of chronic indigestion had left him, and he resolved
to make the plan of his cure the rule of his life. That life was
prolonged to a century—forty years of racking disease followed by
sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed clearness of mind,
unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from unnatural food and
drink saves the trials of constant self-control and the alternative
pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they can follow their
inclinations with impunity.”

[Contents]

C.—PERVERSION.

The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of

unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been
practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition.
Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the
ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster
enacts laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-
juice from a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the
nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the [64]first agricultural
colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have
planted vineyards on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of
Bacchus was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries before the
birth of Homer. The origin of the opium habit antedates the earliest
records of Chinese history; for immemorial ages the Tartars have
been addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare’s milk), the
Germanic nations to beer, the natives of Siam to tea and sago-wine.
Intoxication and the excessive use of animal food were prevalent
vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and Rome.

Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of
dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally
meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—
in distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of
temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras
enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a
“Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but
the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden
to children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated
the fate of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of
intoxicating drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband.
Lycurgus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military
training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in
order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of
public opinion [65]always respected the emulation of patriarchal
frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.

But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those

safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts
formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of
physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of
the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism
sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay,
by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious
sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a
fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the
tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long
night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an
unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the
thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a
wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper
Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For
centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand,
and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the
unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the
lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal
vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no
opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could
plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing
the seeds of bodily diseases [66]which their system of ethics
welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.

Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued

suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the
increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes
found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly
prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath
almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from
Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain
excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not
permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however,
escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly
suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of
drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge,
and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden
as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no
moralist would be willing to condone, … and the strictest observance
of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was
found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but
unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not
cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky,
“who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced
himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order
are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to
plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths
of vice.” [67]
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds
of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes
drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as
the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness
of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that
instinct has avenged itself by its perversion.

[Contents]

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human

degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are
sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted
with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes
drives our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become
the Lethe in which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their
misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to
the grave, and for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens
of life to outweigh its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of
Genesis should be understood in the present meaning of the word;
but historians and biologists agree that the average longevity of our
race has been enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries,
and intemperance is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average
stature has been reduced even below that of the ancient natives of
an enervating climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by
D’Arnaud’s measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On
our own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the [68]perils of the
wilderness has somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood;
but what are the men of modern Europe compared with their iron-
fisted ancestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering Romans,
the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visigoths? Like a building
collapsing under the progress of a devouring fire, the structure of the
human body has shrunk under the influence of the poison-habit; and
there is no doubt that the moral vigor of our race has undergone a
corresponding impairment—appreciable in spite of the recent revival
of intellectual activity and the constant increase of general
information.

The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are

awakening to the significance of their delusion; the power of public
opinion has forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join
the crusade of the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a
chief problem of civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is
too deeply rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the
task of redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of
the wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore.
The statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the
value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice
far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for
educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the
abolition of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms
needed to turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that
waste expresses only the indirect [69]and smaller part of the damage
caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and
happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended
in the purchase of disease were devoted to the promotion of arson
and robbery, the utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief
would probably fall short of the present result. The stimulant habit in
all its forms clouds the sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-
vapor. Alcohol undermines the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks
foster a complication of nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair
the vigor of the cerebral functions. The excessive use of animal food,
too, avenges itself in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It
inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all
theology against a diet of bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the
Sioux missions; and the almost exclusive use of flesh food has,
indeed, afflicted our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous
beasts. The same cause has produced the same effects in western
Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain delighted in
matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the
butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-
baits and Tyburn spectacles.

[Contents]

E.—REFORM.

The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked

protests against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the
advance from special to general principles is often amazingly slow;
and even now the cause of temperance is hampered by the
[70]shortsightedness of reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-
tree by clipping and hacking its more prominent branches. They
would limit prohibition to the more deadly stimulants, not dreaming
that the fatal habit is sure to reproduce its fruit from the smallest
germs; that the poison-vice, in fact, is infallibly progressive, ever
tending to goad the morbid craving of the toper to stronger and
stronger poisons or to a constant increase in the quantity of the
wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy, from laudanum to morphine,
from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of wine to a dozen bottles,
from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of the dram-shop.
“Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin maxim of deep
significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant vice may be
resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial,
constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, all of
which might be saved by the total renunciation of all abnormal
stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that “abstinence
is easier than temperance.”

We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome

disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be
indulged without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing
reaction, far outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary
exaltation. We must teach them that the artifice by which the toper
hopes to cheat Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is
under all circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce,
even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a [71]glimpse of happiness
at all comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance.

But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender,

we must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must
counteract the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming
topers, not to the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to
temperance gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred
concerts” should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and
shortening summer days with free museums, picture galleries,
swings, ball grounds, and foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will
contrive to outbid the devil.

It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian

ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely
sided with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and
spirituous poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are
trying their utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by
frankly admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his
mouth,” and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be
abandoned to the rites of devil-worshipers.

But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of

meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use
of a diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that
virtue. In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American
Redskins, a chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of
carnivorous beasts, and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets
with sixteen courses of flesh food might as well treat a vigilance
[72]committee to sixteen courses of opium. “Frugality” should again
be promoted in the ancient sense of the word; in a community of
reformants temperance and vegetarianism should go hand in hand.
Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used in the extended
sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from all kinds of
unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should become the
canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says, “all drinks
and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced child, but
also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to make them
palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium, tobacco,
alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic
spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but
sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal”
substances, condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians.
“From the egg to the apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that
the frugality of the ancient Romans never went to such extremes.
Milk, eggs, and vegetable fats, in their combination with farinaceous
dishes, might amply replace the flesh food of the northern nations,
and, considering the infinite variety of fruits and vegetables known to
modern horticulture, there seems no reason why a vegetarian diet
should necessarily be a monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will
require the renunciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its
path of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns. [73]
[Contents]
CHAPTER V.
 SKILL.

[Contents]

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously

adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures
the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift.
The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision.
The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper
building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or
distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour
after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well
as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering
its way through the maze of a tangled forest.

Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such

accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to
their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and
longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove
a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-
crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in
pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young
kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run
after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by
gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had
domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam
across the floor of his study. The little engineer [74]had dragged up a
cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to
best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum
and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with
letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to
scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a
misarrangement here and there.

Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two

or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels,
or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of
breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a
plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents
are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal
American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet
copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-
shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law
which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three
hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British
code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in
the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics,
who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of
watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years
the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of
etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their
flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the
retirement of an [75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I.
invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps.
Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own
chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred
watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in
the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-
carpenter of his empire.
[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are
derived from können (practical knowledge), and the first ruler was
the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill,
whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness,
established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is
still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man.
Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in
war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in
the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the
wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops.
Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance
which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of
western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative
value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-
shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments
yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in
four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no [76]doubt,” said
he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely
upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best
weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the
handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the
library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of
such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed
by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a
doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superior
constructiveness of an army that could bridge a river while their
opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of
Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a
plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the
Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a
Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased
planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention
of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the
Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.

Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of

mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work
gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even
an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving
exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular
system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains
the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the
disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet [77]Goethe, whose
intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin,
records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some
mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental
as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of
Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a
school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the
English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a
prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of
speculative philosophers.

Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth

could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best
safeguard against the chief bane of wealth: ennui, with its
temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the
example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his
philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large
and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern
Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be
nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by
our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend
to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a
dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques
Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of
fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill
finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss
in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next
workshop and show [78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see
you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”

Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against

numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by
keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his
playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through
the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the
statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his
manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping
ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to
overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”

[Contents]

C.—PERVERSION.

The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly

to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect
tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the
antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient
Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the
children of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest
without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful
entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-
caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute
articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take
his meals alone.

The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed

antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of
emphasizing that contrast by [79]constant insults to the
representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe,
too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with
the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the
trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as
in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their
own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages
industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were
treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects
decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master,
the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread
for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual
occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have
been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of
Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French
nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the
secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him?
You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The
manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of
employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief
and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-
bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an
incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the
same Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a
plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by [80]highway