Child protection: you're doing it wrong

A very disturbing case of child trafficking has been in the news recently. It seems that since March 2006, 77 Chinese children have gone missing from a children's home in London, and only four have been found:

Organised criminal gangs have exploited a children's home beside Heathrow airport for the systematic trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade across Britain, a secret immigration document reveals.

[...]

Only four have been found. Two girls returned after a year of exploitation in brothels in the Midlands. One was pregnant while the other had been surgically fitted with a contraceptive device in her arm. Others are coerced with physical threats to work as street-sellers of counterfeit goods. It is thought that many work in cannabis farms.

The document reveals that the children are "absconding" at the facilitation of organized crime groups, and when a spokesperson for the home was interviewed on the news recently, he was very quick to point out that the care facility cannot restrict the movements of children, implying that if they want to leave to get involved in prostitution and other nefarious activities, then no one can stop them.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. If, as the news report suggests, these children are taken into care after they have arrived at Heathrow airport having already been initiated into a trafficking ring, the fact is that at the moment the local authority places them with this children's home, it is responsible for their safety; unless the UK government has now turned to state-sanctioned pimping. If these were British children who had been taken from neglectful parents, and had then ended up in the hands of traffickers, all of the UK would be in an uproar. But somehow, we seem to have no problem acting as holdover facilities for Chinese children being sold into prostitution and child slavery. And after these children are taken to this home, how is it that they have the means to subsequently arrange with the traffickers to meet them at pre-designated locations? And why in great googly-moogly, after seeing a trend of flight from this particular institution next to Heathrow, do the authorities still take children fitting this particular profile to this same home, facilitating the traffickers' access? If they do intend to process them through the system and get to the bottom of their unescorted arrival to the UK, why not undertake reasonable measures to see that they are removed from immediate danger?

I'll tell you what it looks like. And you might gasp, choke and splutter at the implication but feel free because here it comes anyway: they can't be arsed. These are Chinese children who as far as they are concerned have already become involved in a system of trafficking, and if they disappear just as easily and as suddenly as they show up, well then so be it. They aren't British. Let someone else deal with them. The very idea that an official from or representing this home would get on the news and suggest that they don't lock the doors so the children can leave to be sold into prostitution if they want is the part that is gasp-worthy. There is no agency here. Would you jump through a window to run headlong into a life of unpaid or underpaid harrowing physical labour if you had the choice? If you didn't feel threatened or coerced or desperate? If you are going to take the step, as a government agency, to 'clean up' the sidewalks outside Heathrow by clearing these wandering children from it, then you are also responsible for taking every reasonable precaution to protect them from threats that you know exist.

As if there weren't enough evidence of buck-passing, Julian Worcester, the deputy director of Children's Services, had this to say:

"There is still a large proportion who go missing but the total numbers are going down," said Worcester. "As a result of coordinated action, Heathrow is now seen as a more difficult airport to traffic people through. We think some of the activity has been displaced to other airports, in particular Stansted in Essex and Manchester."

Ah well that's much better, then. Keep all that nasty trafficking business away from the tourist hubs.

The UK government is at the moment struggling with providing adequate protection for children who merit social care attention. Cases such as the one involving Baby P are strewn all over the news and rightly inspire public outrage that is very slow in dissipating. The lives of these 73 children who have disappeared from this home aren't worth any less than they would be if they had been born here. But it seems the authorities don't see it that way.

For rent or purchase: beach chairs; sunblock; Rastas

Via Gwen at Sociological Images, we're brought this Link International film highlighting Caribbean men who have sex with the female tourists visiting their countries.



As Gwen indicates, the men in these situations are seen as the aggressors, the ones with the power, who charm presumably innocent women into believing that theirs is the one true romance. But there is surely a great deal of power wielded by (comparatively) wealthy, white tourists who commodify sex with these men in the pursuit of their own racialized fantasies. They do not just want a black man, with whom they would presumably have to engage in a courtship on more level ground. They want a black man who is easy to fetishize and who is capable of being bought.

Despite what the video portrays (one would think the only black men in Jamaica and Dominica live on the beach or in the mountains waiting to trap a white woman), these men are poor, yes, but also marginalized within their own societies. They assume the power that is being afforded them by the white purchasers of their product: arguably, a hypermasculine male is exactly what these tourists are buying, and they often want a man who manifests the aggression they visualize these 'objects' to have. You'll notice that the apparent spokesman for the group of young men in Dominica criticizes black, Dominican women as 'not as open-minded', because he would not be afforded the same sexual liberties with his countrywomen as he is with his tourist consumer. Rather than adjust the attitudes and approaches which see women's bodies as public property for him to access, he would rather adjust the women - from ones who are less tolerant of exploitative male behaviour towards those who are seemingly accepting of it.

But the fact is that this is not wholly his choice, as he suggests. Because certainly in my experience, "land sharks", the name often given to this type of male sex worker in the Caribbean, are marginalized to exist outside most mainstream, heterosexual relationships in their societies. (Even the term used frames them as less than human, and as dwellers of a different space.) They are not considered as part of the pool from which Caribbean women might choose their mates, and among other men, are often ridiculed as desperate, homeless, drug dependent, incapable of attracting and providing within regular relationships with women. Even their physical appearance and expressions are targeted as identifiers of their lifestyles, and an indication that one should stay away: their skin which has become extremely dark from spending entire days on the beach; their sun-bleached dreads; and their affected half-American accents. (And there is another group, not highlighted in the video, which is also subject to even further ridicule: male sex workers who have similar relationships with male tourists.)

So the power dynamic is not as discrete as the apparently disgusted hotel owner suggests. The men are in some cases ascribed and allowed power based on the fetishized, 'animal'-dominant relationship that some of these women want to encourage, and based on the fact that they are on home territory, acting as guides and integral to the holiday experience. But this is a service: there must be remuneration for this attention, and the purchaser of the service must exercise some power. In cases where the relationship is removed from its point of origin - back to the woman's home country for example - there is often a shift in the power dynamic away from the man who now has no income and is in unfamiliar surroundings, towards the woman who may have different expectations now that the holiday is over.

Of course, that is not to say there are no situations where women, assuming they are entering an honest relationship, are duped. There are also many cases where such relationships evolve and are sustained, where the men in question are not simply fantasies, but true partners. In general, there is quite a bit more happening here than a straightforward, predatory, male-dominated dynamic, as is often portrayed. With so many issues of race, gender, colonized bodies, economic disparity and human emotion, there must be.