Community-based prevention of child trafficking in Southern Ethiopia

Introduction

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2016) defines human trafficking as ‘the acquisition of people by improper means such as force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them’.

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals continue the UN’s impetus to end poverty, hunger, gender inequality, forced labour, slavery and human trafficking, all of which include and benefit the survival of children (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2015). The African Report on Child Wellbeing, 2016 concludes that addressing child poverty and exploitation demands the coordinated efforts of government, non-government and community-based organisations (African Child Policy Forum [ACPF], 2017).

This article examines the domestic trafficking of children in a certain region of Ethiopia from the standpoint of service providers and community people/officials. The Wolaita zone is 1 of the 13 zonal administrations of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region in Ethiopia. Children between the ages of 7 and 14 are taken from rural areas to work as cheap labour and to sell on the street, and some are sexually exploited in Jimma or Addis Ababa (US Department of State, 2017). Ayalew et al’.s (2013) previous study in the region indicated that child trafficking is increasing in Ethiopia.

The article outlines the issues and literature and then the findings of research based on observation, interviews and group discussion. Findings are limited in that interviews were not conducted with children who knew about trafficking. Rather, aims and objectives of the research, performed in 2016, were confined to how government, non-government, community-based and volunteer personnel worked to prevent the trafficking of children in southern Ethiopia. The African Report on Child Wellbeing 2016 puts the onus on the state to coordinate services for children, provide adequate funding, and make child survival, freedom from violence, and exploitation national priorities:

There is generally a narrow understanding of the range of services needed for children, and therefore of the necessary coordination required within government. Absence of a holistic policy and strategic framework for children is also a barrier to effective overall coordination. Cross-sectoral coordination becomes easier in countries with a comprehensive National Plan of Action for Children. (ACPF, 2017: 41)

Those who contributed to this study agree that governments must channel funding to those working at the local level to prevent child trafficking, to shelter and rehabilitate ‘returnees’ and to put more into economic development in rural areas (also Ayansa, 2016). The state must also put money and effort into prosecuting traffickers and accomplices and legislatively protecting children and youth (ACPF, 2017; Beguele, 2008).

Reasons children are vulnerable

Belete et al. (2014), who conducted another Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region study on child migration, found that poverty, large family size and small land size contribute to child migration and trafficking. The Wolaita zone accounted for 38 percent of children trafficked in their study. Among the children, over 40 per cent had lost both of their parents. Datta (2013) found that children orphaned in Kenya were likely to leave school and ‘… plunge headlong into what is a highly exploitative labour market’ because of the need to survive (p. 106). They are susceptible to being trafficked into a labour reserve with no rights or protection (UNICEF, 2012, p. 13).

The UNODC (2016) global synopsis of smuggling and trafficking reports only on those ‘detected’ as trafficked. There is a cross-over between human smuggling, irregular migrations and trafficking (McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016: 2). Anyone being smuggled might become a victim of traffickers – especially women and children (p. 7):

Increasingly, more vulnerable groups of migrants are moving irregularly, including women and children, raising a raft of complex issues for State and non-State actors alike. (p. 12)

Accordingly, females make up one-third of those smuggled from the Horn of Africa to Europe. Children are also being smuggled, often on their own (Majidi and Oucho, 2016: 64; UNODC, 2016): ¹

Children sometimes travel with their parents or one parent, while others have been sent alone. Those travelling alone face a high risk of being trafficked into labour or sex trade. However, the assumption is that if the children are caught, the law would be lenient enough to allow them to stay in the country. (Majidi and Oucho, 2016: 64)

Over 40 per cent of trafficking happens within countries, which is the focus of this article (McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016: 9). The UNODC (2016) report says that ‘trafficking in persons remains largely a regional and local phenomenon’. Poverty is the main reason for children being enticed to leave home. Traffickers might be known to a child or be part of a chain of people involved in the trafficking, and a child/youth might not know what is happening. It may be done on foot or using various forms of transportation including, as in Ethiopia, mini vans, buses and private vehicles (African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect [ANPPCAN], 2008). The US Department of State (2017) urged the Ethiopian government to put more effort into identifying traffickers who are moving children within the country. That includes children being trafficked to cities for sexual exploitation involving ‘mostly Ethiopian-born perpetrators, including members of the diaspora, with known links to local hotels, brokers, and taxi drivers’ (p. 168).

Effects on children and communities

Children are in danger of permanent physical and psychological injury. They are also at risk of death. At another level, they are robbed of being children, and families and communities are robbed of their children. The median age in Ethiopia is 18 compared to 38 years in the United States (UNDP, 2016). A total of 45 per cent of Ethiopia’s population is under age 15 (Teller and Hailemariam, 2011). There are many children and youth who are at risk in a country where 67 per cent of the population suffer ‘severe multidimensional poverty’ and 84 per cent live in rural areas (Teller and Hailemariam, 2011; UNDP, 2016). When children are removed from their families and communities, the possibilities of security, guidance, and cultural transmission including skills, going to school and being a child are lost. ‘Trafficking’ is about adults preying on vulnerable people, including youth and children, to feed the adult marketplace of perverse opportunity, sending their representatives to small rural communities to coerce both very poor parents and their very poor available children (McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016).

It includes the corruption of government officials, including those in law enforcement, who benefit from human trafficking or smuggling (McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016). Human smuggling, according to the UNODC 2011 report (p. 3):

… could not occur on the large scale that it so often does without collusion between corrupt officials and criminals. Corruption seriously undermines national and international efforts to prevent and control the smuggling of migrants … [it] may occur in countries of origin, transit, or destination. It may be systemic, institutional or individual. (Cited in McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016: 9)

In 2017, the US Department of State’s report noted that more progress had been made in the prosecution of traffickers, which increased from 69 the year before to 640 prosecutions. The Ethiopian government in 2016 also continued to focus public education on the police and judicial system. At the same time, the ‘government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of public officials allegedly complicit in human trafficking offenses’ (US Department of State, 2017: 168). An issue identified by successive US Department of State Trafficking in Persons reports for Ethiopia is that the government did not ‘sufficiently address internal trafficking, including child sex trafficking. It remained without standard procedures for frontline responders to proactively identify trafficking victims among vulnerable intending migrants’ (US Department of State, 2017: 166). Speaking similarly, this research identified the need for more shelters with enough beds, resources and trained staff to work with children who had been trafficked and who were returning to their families.

Federal constitution

The UN 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child confirms a global commitment to the rights of children; to prevent and stop the abuse of children and to put their hunger, health and safety at the top of national economic agendas (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF] UK, 2016). Because there is no child protection act in Ethiopia, the convention fills a legislative void by superseding domestic law in order to provide the legal guidance/authority for the protection of children (ACPF, 2016). The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995) constitution speaks to the rights of the child in article 36. Article 36 (d) states that a child has ‘the right to be protected against exploitative practices, and not to be permitted to engage in any employment which would prejudice its health, education or well-being’. Article 18(2) speaks directly against human trafficking: ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. Trafficking in human beings for whatever purpose is prohibited.’

In Ethiopia the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (WCA) are the key institutions working to identify and prevent trafficking. Community-based organisations, as identified in this study, can also play a key role in protecting children and helping families (Yoseph et al., 2006). Prevention includes educating children and youth, parents, communities, local/village chiefs/politicians, law enforcement, government officials, social workers, teachers and medical professionals about human trafficking (UNICEF UK, 2016; US Department of State, 2017). It is about supporting families in developing a livelihood so they are able to feed their children and to send them to school (Abdissa and Degefa, 2011). The National Social Protection Policy of Ethiopia (2012) identifies the vulnerability of children to trafficking:

vulnerable children could not attend classes because of family’s inability to purchase school uniforms and books, because many do not get adequate food and because a sizable proportion of children are working such long hours that this interferes with their ability to focus on their formal education. There is also limited access to education for children with special needs. (p. 17)

Children may leave home because they see themselves as a burden or conditions at home are untenable.

Research methodology

The research that backgrounds this article was qualitative – including interviews with ‘key-informants’ who had been working with, or peripheral to, child trafficking in the Sodo Town area. This included persons from the government’s WCA, the international non-government World Vision agency, the police department, primary schools and the bus station’s transport office. There were also two focus groups to explore the role of the local community in combating child trafficking. One focus group included drivers and weyallas who work at the bus stations and members of a bus station surveillance team. Another focus group included representation from government and non-government agencies and community-based organisations. All participants were purposively approached because of their knowledge of child trafficking in this region.

From a constructionist perspective, knowledge is produced at a specific time and in a specific place. Understanding phenomena as locally experienced, as is child trafficking in a rural community, is situated in livelihood, land size, family relations and scarcity, a child’s preponderance to being trafficked and more. It is complex. Bailey (2007) says qualitative and constructionist/constructivist research are the same, depending on word preference. Knowledge comes from within lives, circumstances and meanings – it is processually developed rather than externally imposed to prove a hypothesis.

Research for this article was focused on community prevention of child trafficking in Ethiopia and included interviews with international, national and community-based organisations in order to expose gaps in protecting children from being trafficked. Children were not interviewed in this study in order to learn from their experiences of being trafficked – another study also on child trafficking to Jimma Town by Rahel Ayansa (2016) says child victims of trafficking do not want to talk to researchers for fear they will be found out: ‘This is true not only for victims still living in exploitative conditions but also for returnees who were victims of trafficking’ (p. 13). A 15-year-old told Ayansa (2016) that she had been solicited at the funeral of her mother, by a female neighbour, to work in Jimma as she was now on her own:

The woman said I would be paid 800ETB per month, continue my education at night session and I would be treated like a family … I disappeared immediately after the burial … I was engaged in … washing dishes, waxing floors and domestic chores just to mention a few with no pay. (p. 30)

Children and youth are targeted because they are poor. They were offered a better life and good wages, or the chance to go to better schools often at a time when something had happened in the family, that is, the death of a parent. This suggests that traffickers know the village and the families they target.

According to an interview with an elder, children discuss among themselves how to get to Jimma or Addis Ababa and the good things that can happen there. And so they are supported by their peers who also want to go, as one interviewee indicates:

Moreover, brokers make influence on children by deceiving and presenting false promises that their lives will become better in a short period of time if they migrate rather than staying in miserable situation. … Considering their situation … no food to eat, no cloth to wear, no house to stay in so they will easily entrap by brokers snare.

Ayansa (2016) says cultural/economic factors demand that children play a role in contributing to the household and that they take on the responsibility willingly (p. 31).

What people said

Interviewees said that children leave because of the strain of poverty and increased landlessness on families as the rural population increases. Families are unable to sustain their families on small-holdings:

Poverty leads the family not to send their children to the schools; rather they force them to engage them in child labour, which in turn also most of the time leads the child to become vulnerable to child traffickers.

Further, this interviewee says that governmental and nongovernmental anti-trafficking agencies must step up to change the economic capacity of poor and vulnerable groups.

In fact, Adepoju’s (2005) study on human trafficking in African countries indicated that adult relatives sought to benefit from trafficking a dependent child. Parents send their children away thinking their children’s needs will be better met. Economic development in rural locations including access to training would assist in deterring child exploitation and dangerous adult migrations.

UNICEF UK (2016) indicated that it is mainly children who live below an international poverty line set at US$1.90/day:

While children aged 17 and under account for about one third (34 per cent) of the total population in low- and middle-income countries, they make up nearly half (46 per cent) of the population living on less than US$1.90 per day … (p. 72)

Prevention

The bus station and schools are important sites of prevention. Those working at the bus station watch who is with whom. They would know if an adult is showing up regularly with a different child in hand. It is up to them to report their suspicions to police – and for the police to act. Adults are supposed to have some form of identification linking them with the child. The international non-governmental organisation (NGO) World Vision has, along with the government’s Women’s and Children’s Agency, trained those working at the bus station to be aware of traffickers and how they operate. Posters have also been distributed. School personnel are teaching students how to be aware and to protect themselves. Those most vulnerable though are children who are not in school and who are without parental supervision. Traffickers pose as a friend and may even be a relative or someone known in the village. Children are lured in by the promise of being taken care of, of having food and new opportunities in the city (Adepoju, 2005). As one informant said,

On holidays, specially (Meskel) most of the children’s come to visit their family. This children’s always come with new shoes, clothes, mobile phones and other materials. These materials seduce those children who live with their communities and which in turn leads them to leave their community and make them vulnerable to the traffickers.

The interviewee also emphasized the number of children who migrated and being trafficked increases on the time of holiday.

From this piece, it would appear that children are not aware of what can happen to them. Parents are also lured into believing that their children will be better off:

… because a majority of families in rural areas are engaged in subsidence agriculture and could not afford to send their children to school, the brokers use the advantage of their families to traffic child by giving promises like affording the child education and employment.

These people make child trafficking into a ‘safe’ transaction that parents will agree to:

Because parents can contribute to their children being trafficked, we are persuading the parents that their children will benefit from staying on at school. However, if parents simply cannot afford this, the school members are helping very poor children with books and education materials.

A number of informants pointed out that ‘brokers’ trafficking children know how to get around any surveillance happening. One participant confirmed that

To smuggle the children, brokers use contract buses that they pay double than the legal tariff. The bus always starts the journey in mid nights. Because in the night time there is no surveillance, in most part of the country. The other strategies they designed was brokers did not come with the children rather they gave 200 birr and mobile numbers which they receive [when] children [reach] their destination.

Representatives of the WCA regularly attend court proceedings in the towns of Sodo and Areka to observe prosecutions of crimes against children. Interviewees and focus group participants said they wanted training on the existing laws and on how they can bring traffickers to prosecution. They wanted perpetrators exposed and charged.

According to the US Department of State (2014),

Between June and July 2013, courts in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR) reportedly heard 267 cases involving illegal smugglers and brokers. In addition, in Gamo Gofa, a zone within SNNPR, the zonal court convicted six traffickers in 2013 – the first convictions in that area’s history.

Despite more prosecutions, which are mainly focused on trafficking across borders, the Ethiopian government did not provide enough support, including available shelters, to victims both of cross-border and internal trafficking:

An organization in Addis Ababa identified and provided familial reunification services to more than 300 child trafficking victims, while another organization reunified more than 1,500 potential victims; the government did not provide any financial or in-kind support for these services. (US Department of State, 2016: 168)

The US Department of State’s (2015) report said the Ethiopian government failed on too many occasions to ‘provide adequate assistance to trafficking victims – both those exploited internally or after migrating overseas – relying almost exclusively on international organizations and NGOs to provide services to victims without providing funding to these organizations’. This hadn’t changed in 2017, as those being helped by NGOs, especially in Addis Ababa, increased in number:

In 2016, Parliament approved a second National Human Rights Action Plan, spanning 2016-2020, which included various activities to curb trafficking, including a media campaign and increased efforts in urban centers to assist women and child victims. However, the government did not report allocating specific funding for the action plan. (US Department of State, 2017: 168)

Community mobilisation

Focus group participants said that community mobilisation is crucial to preventing the problem. They also added that the Women’s and Children’s Office in Sodo Town had been working on community mobilisation and had organised child rights committees in 11 kebeles of the town:

The main tasks of the mobilization was to mobilize and participate the community in programs such as OVC [orphans and vulnerable children] task force, CRC committee, community based child care programs.

At the same time,

There is a need to establish and strengthen the existing institutional capacities and network among relevant government organizations, CBOs, NGOs and youth group in schools.

One problem is that members of the community are said to be unwilling to participate:

The community has always a tendency to assume that only government organizations are responsible to combat child trafficking. There is little or no participation from most of community members. Most of them do not give the necessary attention to the problem so as most of government intervention mechanisms fail to achieve their goals.

Perpetuating this reliance is that government ‘awareness creation’ has predominantly concentrated on government officials and influential personalities, thereby ignoring the people who experience it. Communities most ‘at risk’ because they are in the rural areas are left out, when they are most in need of the information in order to find solutions. The US Trafficking in Persons report (2015) noted that

In 2014, the national trafficking taskforce collaborated with international organizations to launch a community conversations trafficking awareness program, conducted in over 325 neighborhoods with the participation of 25 to 40 residents in each neighborhood session, including local and district officials.

Similarly, in 2016 the Attorney General’s office in Ethiopia collaborated with ‘an international organization to increase awareness of the anti-trafficking proclamation’ using workshops and the media while continuing to support the ‘community conversations’ (p. 168).

Datta’s (2013) research on orphaned and vulnerable children in Kenya confirms the centrality of community-based organisations in the protection of children because they know the families and their circumstances:

The community support system does not have formal management structures, systems and paid staff. But the strength of this system lies in its ownership and in the deep-rooted culture of the community. (Datta, 2013)

One problem is that, as in Jimma, many of those working on prevention at the community level, namely the orphans and vulnerable children’s committees and the children’s rights committees, are volunteers. They cannot cover travel expenses or the resources needed to prevent trafficking that includes public education.

Shelters and reintegration

Sodo town has two temporary shelters that can accommodate victims until re-uniting with their families. But they cannot accommodate the number of children who need it. They need more beds, food, clothing, medical supplies. Sambo’s (2009) study in child trafficking in South Africa similarly found that there were neither enough shelters nor enough funding to give children the help they required and to assist with re-integration into families and communities.

Participants in the present study said the same:

The point is that the children are not always willing to stay home because they don’t get enough food and other materials to stay with their family. The children are promised to get enough food and other necessities. However they don’t get what they were promised by the reintegrated agencies. The main reason was nobody follows up with reintegrated children which leads them to[being] re-trafficked. The best solution for this problem is organizing the CRC committees with financial and trained man power, which in turn facilitate the combating process.

What this person is alluding to is the need for more effort to be put into providing support before children are enticed into leaving home, and for when/if they return. The latter, according to participants, includes providing a safe haven, medical and psychological support, and mediation work with families. An interviewee from the WCA said shelters lack a budget to hire the personnel required, including social workers and nurses, to assist with health, family/kin and emotional issues. ‘Re-integration’ can fail without sustained and meaningful support. One participant said that before reintegration the family needs to be prepared and provided with support so they can support their children. A small amount is given to the family to provide for the returning child – but this gets swallowed up before the child returns home. ‘A child come back to the town or become re-trafficked again.’ These particular areas – children returning to families and children requiring shelter – require adequate funding and trained personnel including social workers and nurses, as indicated by participants.

Figure 1 illustrates the process of trafficking and the role community members and agencies can play at every juncture to prevent it from happening.OPEN IN VIEWER

Building community capacity

The capacity of community- and faith-based organisations, child rights committees and orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) groups who know the needs of children and of the local community to protect children may be enhanced if they are placed in key positions of service development and delivery. Many participants in the study spoke of the need for community involvement.

According to focus group discussants, both the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) committees and OVC task forces lack the technical and financial capacity to achieve the goals they were set to achieve. The CRC committees are given the mandate to ensure the protection of children from any type of exploitation. However, members of the committee are volunteers without the resources or authority with which to help a family in crisis. Social workers in the community and at the university can assist in training as well as working with children and families. A combined effort between international non-government agencies, government agencies such as Women and Children’s and Labour and social affairs, community-based organisations and volunteers, and the social work programme at Jimma University could work to prevent child trafficking and advise public policy as well as training and funding.

Respondents identified the need for financial and human resources to run shelters and provide support to children and families. Iddirs, that are present in every village or kebele, and that support community members in times of need, might be a community-based service that could offer public education and have people on hand to provide support and advice. It is whether the capacity is there for what is a community-run service to branch out into social services, increased programme development and financial accountability (Opare, 2007). Be that as it may, those interviewed and those participating in focus groups agreed that the community must be more involved in prevention and on-going protection.

A point was also raised on working with those legitimately recruiting labour, so as to also identify those who are not legitimate in their intent:

The problem is that some people … didn’t differentiate between migration and trafficking. I believe that there should be another alternative for children.

Here is an allusion to a different understanding of ‘child labour’ as situated in the economic unit of the family and in cultural expectations (McEwan, 2009: 133)

Those interviewed spoke to the need for children to also be involved in any anti-trafficking initiatives, including (as is possible) returnees. They would be able to inform the reality and dynamics, and possibly, given support and protection, identify the people involved in child trafficking.

Social work role

In this study, those who participated thought that community-based organisations were in the best position to educate people on the presence of human traffickers/trafficking. This needs community knowledge which a top-down approach might not have. One resource is the social work programme at Jimma University that includes a community- and programme-development focus. Field work takes place within communities and can assist in strengthening community-based initiatives, education and the ability to influence social policy that includes accessing funding for programme development.

Pyle (2016) says that responding to the immediate and crucial in a community-based way is about decolonising social work because the response must fit what is possible in a specific location and between those ‘actors’ involved. It is community people, children, youth, adults and the support network that has developed, perhaps on an ad hoc basis, who must decide what is needed and how to put it in place. A community-connected social work programme can bring this together in a participatory research that includes people talking together in order to understand the problem, the needs, and the immediate and long-term support required.

State involvement

At the same time, there needs to be the political will to stop trafficking of children by being serious about identifying and prosecuting traffickers and by providing safe havens for children. The research interview with the World Vision project officer revealed that the sentences given to those convicted did not consider the psychological and physical damage of victims. Participants of this study also identified the need for a central database of perpetrators and convictions, accomplices, family/community connections and locations to support investigations and prosecutions, along with informed and honest policing. Participants of this study claimed that institutionalised corruption contributed to protecting traffickers. A participant gave an example:

One mini-bus owner who is also driver had raped six children. The person was convicted based on his friend’s exposition that he had raped children. The guy has taken the children to Addis Ababa, where he raped them in his condominium house. After hearing the problem the bus station anti trafficking committees opened the charge, after presenting all legal and medical documents in addition to individual plaintiff. The person was found guilty of all offences. However, without any sentence the person was released free. The reason he released free was that he gave the judges and other legal prosecutors more than 300,000 birr.

This individual critically concluded,

Even though, the law to protect children’s and victims of child trafficking is good in protecting children, the problem is when we come to implementation of this laws into action.

Noteworthy here is the vigilance of the bus station anti-trafficking committee.

Conclusion

Both focus groups and interviewees said poverty, limited land size due to population density and loss of parent or parents through death or through migration contribute to increased child trafficking in the Wolaita zone of Ethiopia.

Prevention and rehabilitation of children at the community level were identified in a partnership with government commitment to protect children from trafficking. Poverty and lack of opportunity contribute to child trafficking in rural Ethiopia. Ayansa (2016) suggests that the empowerment of women is central to providing for children and getting them through school. Rural women in particular might benefit from access to skills training and credit, and community-based organisations can be used to develop and provide relevant skills training (p. 38). Government, non-government and community-based organisations pooling knowledge and resources in a joint preventive strategy to combat child trafficking and support vulnerable families may result in a cohesive holistic response. The school of social work at Jimma University within its community-development mandate could play a co-ordinating role.

Ayansa (2016) and findings in this research reveal the paramount need for genuine and thorough law enforcement within a state commitment to the protection of children from all forms of violence and exploitation. The ACPF (2016) says that two-thirds of children in Africa experience ‘multiple deprivations’, which increases their vulnerability to abuse and violence including trafficking in countries where the protection of children is of low priority (p. 25). The federal government has to find the funding to meet the promises it makes in policy, especially in terms of protecting children and charging and prosecuting offenders, including those who are known and who are running a business on the trafficking – if not sexual exploitation – of children and youth.

Gordon Brown, special envoy to UNICEF on education, remarked that, unlike an annual visit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to scrutinise government spending, ‘No government fears a visit from those looking at the fundamental rights of the child’ (Elliott, 2014).