Abstract |
This chapter presents a very different picture to the last. The stories featured here directly challenge prevailing child trafficking discourse and call into question mainstream anti-trafficking policy. They are drawn from my long-term engagement with individuals and communities labelled as ‘traffickers’ and as ‘victims of trafficking’ in Benin and Nigeria and from parallel work conducted by other scholars in similar contexts. They reflect both the critical academic counter-narrative that has developed as an alternative to dominant anti-trafficking discourse, and the self-understanding and self-representation of those individuals who are so often violently (mis-)represented by that discourse. These stories depict subjects and their actions in thicker, more plausible terms than those of the dominant discourse and show how, when situated within local or alternative webs of meaning, what the anti-trafficking architecture makes sense of as trafficking can be made sense of very differently indeed. |