Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security

The phenomenon of child trafficking holds a unique position as an issue of significant contemporary relevance, occupying a principal place in debates about human rights today. The interchangeable terms trafficking and modern slavery evoke emotive responses and proclamations about abolition of contemporary ills, viewed as the ultimate aberration when a child is involved. The classification of children under legal frameworks marks them as different, as ‘other’, and in the context of laws implemented to address trafficking, slavery, and children on the move more generally, this distinction is complicated.

This book charts the emergence, decline and re-emergence of child trafficking law and policy during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of the historical origins of child trafficking by utilising the wealth of information located within the non-digitised archives of the League of Nations. It focusses upon the Committee onthe Traffic in Women and Children to engage with League of Nations policy to provide an insightful and original contribution to the current body of literature. This is a book that seeks to critique the entanglements of children’s rights and colonialism in relation to the mobility and exploitation of children. It centralises the legacy of colonialism, the undercurrents of race, white supremacy, patriarchy, and their ongoing influence upon contemporary anti-trafficking legal and policy responses. Through utilizing what the author identifies as the ‘anti-trafficking machine’ as a theoretical framework, the book challenges contemporary law and policy responses to child trafficking. This theoretical framework has been adopted to illustrate a central hypothesis of the book – that the contemporary anti-trafficking agenda is both imperialist and a continuity of colonial attitudes.

This book uses a mixed-methods approach to understand the role of technology in facilitating exploitation in the UK’s off-street sex markets. It offers a critical social perspective on a truly complex social phenomenon encapsulating both online and offline spaces. It makes quite complex topics, including web scraping, data mining, and big data analytics, accessible to a wider audience through the careful introduction and discussion of a series of interrelated topics relevant to the trafficking-technology nexus. It synthesises critical social theory with critical data studies to offer a nuanced perspective on the role of technology in facilitating organised exploitation within the sex market. It discusses the practical implications for policing and harm reduction in the context of exploitation in the sex market. In addition to being of particular interest to law enforcement practitioners, researchers, and students of the sex market, exploitation and human trafficking, it will also be of interest as a contemporary case study of digital criminology or computational criminology.