Drawing Conclusions

Abstract

This book began by promising a critical history of child trafficking, and it is time to finish by driving that critique home. As things stand, and according to what this book has shown, the institutions working to protect children from trafficking in fact more commonly perpetuate themselves, secure funding, pay employee wages and buttress their legitimacy by appearing to do things that in reality they often do not. At best, therefore, they could be seen to achieve troublingly little that might be considered useful for the children and young people whose apparent suffering constitutes their raison d’être. But at worst, they make the lives of these young people even more difficult, either by pioneering interventions which are directly counterproductive or by depoliticising the very political–economic and ideological conditions generating precisely the problems they seek to ameliorate. Under these circumstances, would it not make sense to conclude that, despite what Boyden calls their ‘misguided good intentions’ (1997), most anti-traffickers are engaged in little more than hegemony in action?