Children and Young Persons Victimised Through Trafficking – Regional Efforts to Ensure the Right to Protection...

Within the cooperation on Children at Risk under the umbrella of the Council of the Baltic Sea States, a programme on Unaccompanied and Trafficked Children in the region of the Baltic Sea States have been set up by the Working Group for Cooperation on Children at Risk, WGCC. This paper examines some of the issues and problems facing the implementation of the programme. It also looks at the dominating adult centred view of trafficking and the obstacles this poses for the protection of children and young persons below 18 victims of trafficking and in danger of exploitation. This paper also argues that the agency and activity of the young person should be put to use in both rehabilitation programmes and in preventive programmes in order to make them inclusive and not discriminative to groups of young people that do not fit into the "innocent victim" concept. Young persons in institutions in our region should sometimes be recognised as victims of trafficking. This paper argues that this is another area where the fight against trafficking is age specific, adult women are not to be found within institutions. The paper also argues that attention must be given to the contexts needed to rehabilitate children that are victimised and points to the fact that major attention has been given to the legal framework set up to curb trafficking without enough knowledge of the impact of the trafficking process on the affected victims. The paper further discusses what differentiates the rehabilitation of victims of trafficking from assistance given to victims of abuse or of violence and puts forward the proposal that one detrimental aspect of being victim of a trafficking process is becoming involved in the context that facilitates exploitation. All attempts at assistance should be tailored as to counteract this context that, the article argues, has a detrimental impact on the young person's development. The article can be downloaded as an pdf file attached below.
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Children and Young Persons Victimised Through Trafficking – Regional Efforts to Ensure the Right to Protection, Care and Rehabilitation.pdf154.61 KB

Submitted by admin on Thu, 2007-05-24 10:35.