This chapter discusses how slave traffickers adapted to the new circumstances created by Brazil’s 1831 ban on the transatlantic slave trade. While the ban by no means prevented further slave trafficking, it did force significant changes. In Pernambuco, the fourth most important destination for enslaved Africans in the Americas, traders could still reap abundant profits if they were willing to use small ships, pack them with the compact bodies of children and adolescents, and forge active partnerships with the complicit plantation owners who controlled the coast, roads, and towns surrounding Brazil’s natural harbors. In encouraging these new and brutal economic logics, the 1831 ban deeply impacted both the social demographics of Pernambucan slavery and the political and economic networks that structured the province.

Generations after the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), West African digital creative writers imagine newer iterations of slavery or recreate parodies of the TAST. Whether a story revolves around a street child hawking goods in Accra traffic, or a gifted child who is trafficked from a village in Nigeria to America, these short stories perpetuate fears of—but also resistance to—new forms of trafficking and labor exploitation that are endemic in the West African sub-region. While research has examined the ways in which these tropes appear in cheap popular fiction, not much has been done regarding new media, such as online short fiction, which is avidly consumed by West African youth. This chapter uses two short stories to interrogate different types of slavery in online spaces and to explore literary choices that inform the treatment of this theme in the digital age.

This chapter discusses how slave traffickers adapted to the new circumstances created by Brazil’s 1831 ban on the transatlantic slave trade. While the ban by no means prevented further slave trafficking, it did force significant changes. In Pernambuco, the fourth most important destination for enslaved Africans in the Americas, traders could still reap abundant profits if they were willing to use small ships, pack them with the compact bodies of children and adolescents, and forge active partnerships with the complicit plantation owners who controlled the coast, roads, and towns surrounding Brazil’s natural harbors. In encouraging these new and brutal economic logics, the 1831 ban deeply impacted both the social demographics of Pernambucan slavery and the political and economic networks that structured the province.

Chapter 5 articulates recommendations for responding to orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking. The chapter advocates for a comprehensive multi-sector framework that focuses on both anti-trafficking and child protection mechanisms to combat orphanage trafficking using the three pillars for addressing human trafficking that are found in the Trafficking Protocol: prosecution, prevention and protection. Using this framework, the chapter recommends that countries respond to orphanage trafficking through criminalising and prosecuting orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking; preventing orphanage trafficking through addressing vulnerability, demand, corruption and complicity; and providing protection and assistance for child victims and survivors of orphanage trafficking focusing on identification, reintegration and access to remedies. The chapter advocates that a child-rights-based approach with a focus on prevention and protection, as opposed to just prosecution, must be at the centre of implementation of this framework.

Chapter 4 situates the process of orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking under international law. The chapter applies the international framework on child trafficking to the process of orphanage trafficking including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. The chapter argues that the process of orphanage trafficking should be recognised as a form of child trafficking under the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime 2000. The definition of child trafficking has two elements: the act element and the purpose element. The chapter then turns to applying the definition of child trafficking found in article 3 of the Trafficking Protocol to the process of orphanage trafficking, establishing that the act element is present. It also demonstrates how the exploitation that paper orphans experience meets the purpose element of the child trafficking definition in the Trafficking Protocol.

The introduction highlights the significance of this book. It provides a brief overview of orphanage trafficking and outlines the central arguments put forward.

This chapter traces how historical analogies have enabled the use of the terms slavery and abolition in both the anti-trafficking and the anti-incarceration communities. By placing the often-contradictory approaches these two communities bring to the history of slavery, we trace how a belief in historical progress and an emotional investment in the power of innocence – both concepts embedded in our understanding of childhood – have helped to forge vexed and contradictory definitions of both slavery and freedom. Ultimately we argue that the complex work of historical analogy requires us to imagine history, and the solutions we create in response to history, outside of a developmental model that views the degradation of enslavement a stage we can outgrow or discard.