trafficking2

WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA

In the beginning, she [my boss] was nice to me, but then she changed. Any time I
did something wrong, she would shout at me and insult me. Sometimes she would
tell her friends what I had done, and they would come over and beat me. . . . She
would curse me and say I had no future.
—Assoupi H., sixteen, a child domestic worker in Togo

In west and central Africa, girls as young as seven provide a cheap workforce to
families needing assistance with housework or small commercial trades. They
work long days performing a variety of tasks, such as selling bread, fruit or milk in
the market, grilling skewers of meat on the roadside, or working in a small
boutique. Some describe selling bread in the market from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m, then
returning home to bake bread for the next day. Others are forced to spend all day
pounding fufu, a doughy paste made of mashed yams or cassava. When not
working in markets, girls perform domestic chores such as preparing meals,
washing dishes, or caring for young children. One sixteen-year old girl was
trafficked to Togo when she was only three. “I had to fetch water for the house,
sweep, wash the dishes, and wash clothes,” she said. “I would bathe the children,
cook for them, and wash their clothes. When they were young, they cried a lot.”

Child domestics work under constant threat of punishment and physical abuse. “If
I lost any yam in the pounding, the woman beat me—slapped me with her hand,” a
Togolese girl reported. Another said, “If we didn’t sell all the bread in one day, she
[the boss] would beat us with a stick.” In interviews with Human Rights Watch,
girls described being struck with blunt objects and electric wire, and threatened
with punishment and sometimes death. Many escaped following an incident of
unendurable abuse, after which they lived abandoned in the street. Girls also
faced the risk of sexual abuse by older men or boys living in the same house or
when living in the street.

Child domestic work is linked to the broader phenomenon of child trafficking,
which occurs along numerous routes in west and central Africa. The United
Nations estimates that 200,000 children are recruited for labor exploitation each
year in the region that includes Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire,
Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and Togo. Child traffickers capitalize on a
combination of entrenched poverty and weak child protection laws, as well as a
high demand for cheap labor in host countries. Children orphaned by HIV/AIDS or
other causes may be disproportionately vulnerable due to the stigma they face, as
well as the economic pressures caused by the loss of a breadwinner. Child
trafficking is also linked to the denial of education, especially for girls, who may be
the first to be withdrawn from school to earn a living. A number of children report
that the prohibitive cost of school supplies or uniforms forces them to withdraw
from school, after which they are recruited by child traffickers.

Some countries in the region have enacted anti-trafficking legislation in
compliance with the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish the Trafficking
of Persons (2000), but such laws remain poorly enforced. Gabonese authorities
reportedly conduct periodic roundups of child laborers and arrange for their
repatriation to their country of origin. Employers and traffickers are rarely
prosecuted, however. While some bilateral and multilateral repatriation
agreements exist, efforts to negotiate a regional anti-trafficking convention
stalled in 2002. Governments also fail to provide adequate protection to trafficked
children. While some short-term shelters exist, follow-up and rehabilitation are
rarely conducted, and a lack of child protection measures often allows children to
be re-trafficked multiple times.