Talk:Trafficking of children

Addition of Child Begging

I am planning to contribute an addition to this page by discussing one important facet of child trafficking, forced begging. The current state of this article is extremely devoid of detail and I hope to expand the information available on just one part of a much greater whole. Forced begging is the practice of children being coerced into begging in urban centers to generate money for their traffickers or caregivers. Through this article I seek to improve general knowledge on the current state of child begging, its causes and effects, and strategies implemented to eliminate the issue. More specifically, I will take a look at how this practice impacts a rising generation’s capabilities. For my research I will examine a number of scholarly sources on specific instances of forced begging in children and their implications, such as Kevin Bale’s work Disposable People. Because this article is undergoing revisions completed by a fellow student I foresee the new layout implemented to better allow for my addition, as well as other critical improvements. I would truly appreciate any input that you may have and feel free to follow my sandbox in the coming weeks for developments! Additionally, I would like to disclose that this contribution is part of an assignment for a course at Rice University and I encourage you to visit our page below if you have any questions or concerns regarding the project. Avo92 (talk) 05:50, 9 March 2012 (UTC) Template:WAP assignment Hello All! I have recently added the section on child begging and would love any input that you may have! If anything is unclear or you have any suggestions on how to best improve the entry please do not hesitate to let me know! Thanks, Avo92 (talk) 21:46, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposed Expansion, Restructuring, and Revisions

Template:WAP assignment Clearly, this article is in significant need of development; its content is quite brief, outdated, and in some areas, poorly written, hence the Start Class designation. Yet, the trafficking of children has been internationally recognized as a severe human rights violation, and thus, this article has been listed as High Importance by WikiProject Human Rights. The current structure of the article consists of only two sections – “Defining child trafficking” and “International legislation,” while, in reality, the trafficking of children is much more complex. Accordingly, in the upcoming weeks, I plan to make significant expansions and revisions. As the course banner above indicates, the basis for this editing is my enrollment in the “Poverty, Gender, and Development” course at Rice University, in which I have and will continue to conduct a significant amount of academic research regarding this issue. Specifically, I plan to restructure this article entirely, resulting in five major sections:

• Defining child trafficking – This section will detail the international definitions of child trafficking, in addition to exploring the major types of child trafficking (forced labor, child begging, sex trafficking, etc.). Major international legislation regarding child trafficking will also be introduced.
• Mechanisms – This section will examine the primary economic and social mechanisms that promote and sustain child trafficking, including the supply and demand framework, poverty, and gender inequality.
• Prevalence – This section will explore the prevalence of child trafficking worldwide, as well as in several specific regions, including Latin America, Asia, and the United States.
• Impacts – This section will highlight the major impacts of child trafficking on three groups: children, families & communities, and nations.
• Solutions – This section will examine various legal, social, and economic solutions to this issue, taking a specific focus on the role of education.

Clearly, the task I have set before me is ambitious, and I anticipate that my major contribution will be to provide a basic framework for this article that facilitates future, more in-depth contributions from my fellow Wikipedians. In addition, I hope to add this article to two WikiProjects, WikiProject Sexology and sexuality and WikiProject Crime, and one task force, the Sex work task force. As I move forward with my project, I would sincerely appreciate any comments, suggestions, or feedback. I look forward to the opportunity to expand this article, and thus increase the global public’s access to accurate and detailed information regarding the trafficking of children. Crr4 (talk) 19:06, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

My only suggestion: If you have a lot of material to add, consider adding some to this article and some to other articles that are more specific than trafficking of children, and if the latter don't exist create them. Creating an article requires that the subject of the article be notable, and the sourcing you cite will often help you meet that standard. An article should not exceed roughly 100KiB (about 10-14,000 words) or on slower computers it can take too long to load, resulting in potential readers going away.

To add any article to a WikiProject, simply add the WikiProject's template to the talk page (if a definition of the WikiProject's scope is published, do so only if within that scope). The WikiProject has the option of removing the template to remove the article from the WikiProject, in which case their choice would be accepted. I haven't checked whether the same applies to task forces.

I'm not knowledgeable enough on trafficking to want to edit much on it myself. Best wishes to you and thank you for undertaking the work.

Nick Levinson (talk) 21:31, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

This is good advice, thank you so much. One other thing I'm concerned about - Is it possible to change the title of the page to "Child trafficking" rather than "Trafficking of children"? It seems to me that "child trafficking" is a much simpler title. Since I'm new to Wikipedia, I know I'm not authorized to make the change - any ideas on how I can go about doing it? Or enlist someone who could? Thanks! Crr4 (talk) 02:31, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

In this article's case, consensus should be sought first, especially if the name has been considered before by consensus. See Wikipedia:Article names#Considering title changes and Wikipedia:Moving a page. I suspect editors of this article may have a view on renaming, so I suggest starting a new Talk topic on this page that is just about the proposed renaming, give your rationale, and invite comments. If no one replies or consensus agrees (consensus is not a simple vote but considers reasoning), go ahead with the normal process for renaming. That includes first editing the article to use the new term or both terms. After renaming, the old name will automatically serve as a redirect to the new name. Also, after renaming, look for other articles that link to this one and edit them accordingly, then do likewise for templates that list many topically-related articles including this one and edit them accordingly. Finally, if that's too much to do, make a redirect from the wished-for name to the current name (if there isn't one now) and visitors who type the wished-for name will be automatically redirected to this article. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:25, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

child-selling research open

(The following is copied, with a little editing, from Talk:Child-selling#research possible:)

On child-selling, Google and literature database searches can be tried. I didn't. For example, further globalization of the article, clarification of baby-farming operations in Britain, addition of criminal case reports, review of the 1950s U.S. Senate hearings, and a transcript of the 60 Minutes CBS news program in ca. 1992 about the Tennessee Children's Home Society or Georgia Tann would be helpful. Feel free.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:24, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

content needing interim editing

Content already in the article before the merger has not been edited much, but it needs more work, just as the article is about to be further edited anyway by another editor.

I moved some content from the lede, resulting in some redundancies and clumsy styling for which I did not have enough expertise to resolve. That's in the International Legislation section.

The previous version of this article had an interesting sentence that I deleted because it was supported by a link that is now dead. If anyone knows what it used to point to, please edit.

Wikipedia prefers secondary sources over primary ones. To that end, if a sentence says what a law means and if it is referenced directly to a law, it probably should be referenced to an authoritative secondary source about the law (the law can also be cited), because one may reasonably wonder whether Wikipedia editors are competent to interpret law themselves. The sentence is this one (approximate as subject to recent editing): "According to international legislation, in the case of children, the use of force or other forms of coercion, such as abduction, fraud, deception, the abuse of power, or a position of vulnerability does not need to be present in order for the crime to be considered trafficking." I did not write or source the sentence originally, so I leave it to other editors.

The lede is now very short. It can be expanded. I recommend doing so only after the body has been edited. The lede should be a summary of the body and should have no citations of its own (citations should support statements in the body).

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:31, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Above, I mentioned a dead link and a deleted statement. I found a URL that may have the same content as the dead link had. But I don't want to try to evaluate it myself. If you think it's important for the article, please edit accordingly. The old URL, the one I deleted:

http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf

The new URL:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060928150400/http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf

The latter is for the old URL as accessed Sep. 28, 2006, for archive.org and the archive.org URL in turn was accessed by me Mar. 15, 2012.

Nick Levinson (talk) 15:50, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

Edits uploaded!

Hi there, I've uploaded a total expansion/restructuring of this article, including the newly merged "child-selling" section. My colleague is also planning on adding a section on "child begging" in the near future. Any feedback on these edits would be MUCH appreciated, and personally addressed by me in a timely manner. Thanks so much! Crr4 (talk) 04:59, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

That's a lot of work and I admire it. I haven't read all of it and plan to soon; I'll likely have more time this weekend.

The lede should be a summary of the body and should have no references. The references thus should be moved to the body. If there's no place in the body to put a reference, then a statement the reference supports should be moved, copied, or expanded and the reference put with the statement into the body.

Some content that was deleted led me to wonder why:

• That exploitation can be life-long (especially when the life is short) or temporary, which was in the lede, is not meant to express exploitation as nice. Rather, when the exploitation leads to adoption, although losing families are broken and some receiving families are exploitative, some are loving and caring, and in that case the exploitation is an important part of the child's background but is not newly occurring in their subsequent years, as id often true of adoption. That exploitation can be either temporary or permanent should be somewhere, perhaps in the section Impacts, subsection Children and Families.
• "One proposal is the [[Hague Adoption Convention|Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption]], a treaty which would ban child-buying.<ref>Raymond, Barbara Bisantz, ''The Baby Thief'', ''op. cit.'', p. 251.</ref>" Is this outdated?
• Some See Also links disappeared. Were there article quality problems at the destinations? Unless they were so severe as to make the links misleading, I think it's better to link and look forward to article improvements.
• Popular culture around child-selling was deleted. I don't think much popular culture makes fun of topics. Rather, it shows that the subject has been more widely treated than in academic and news sources, and is often included in many articles. While Swift's A Modest Proposal was apparently intended as humorous and goes so far as to present eating of babies, it is well-known literature that used irony to make a different point. I don't think its listing here would demean the subject. Is that your concern?
• Further reading is for sources that add to the general subject but don't warrant citing in support of specific statements. Little Princes, the book, seems to qualify. What is your opinion?

The References section, except when it's only a couple of references long, should usually be set either to two columns or to 30em. Some browsers don't show the effect (I think Microsoft's being one), but others do. You set to one column, or full page width.

Nick Levinson (talk) 15:52, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Some references appear to be identical. A method that allows all of the statements to be supported by referents but with fewer footnotes is to name the ones that are to be used more than once. So, instead of <ref>Source, page 34.</ref> more than once, write <ref name="src-p34">Source, page 34.</ref> once and then <ref name="src-p34" /> for all other statements requiring the identical reference. Ref element names can use letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Some items in the External Links section appear to duplicate what's in the footnotes. If so, the duplicates generally should be deleted.

Thanks for taking care of the References column setting. I'll wait a week before acting on the other items one way or another.

Nick Levinson (talk) 15:59, 16 March 2012 (UTC) (Corrected proofreading error: 16:05, 16 March 2012 (UTC))

I completed editing on some of the above issues, those on a treaty, exploitation as temporary or permanent, See Also links, and popular culture. I leave the others to editors prepared to address them. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:48, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

clarifications needed

The following sentence in the lede is unclear: "The distinction outlined in this definition is important, because some countries have chosen to set the 'age of majority' lower than 18, thus influencing exactly what practices legally constitute child trafficking." While variation in age will affect statistics, other than that I don't understand how it affects "exactly what practices legally constitute child trafficking." Older children probably engage in somewhat different practices than do younger ones, at least statistically. But I wonder if what is meant is only the effect on counts of how many people being trafficked are children, rather than in how they're exploited.

In the section Types of Child Trafficking, in the subsection Forced Labour, the phrase "usually 14 at the lowest" is not well written. Is "14 at the lowest" meant? Or is "usually 14 or more" meant? My guess is that no one knows the minimum, since since some nations may leave that to inferior jurisdictions and some may have no law on point. In that case, the latter may be more accurate.

In the same section, in the subsection Children in Armed Forces, it says, "State parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that member of their armed forces who have not ....": Should the word be "member" be plural, according to the source? If the source says the singular, is that the source's error? If the source says "member", probably "[sic]" should be added after "member".

In the section Mechanisms, it says "movement will occur". This seems to include the trivial case of a child being sold between families with both families probably living in the same small community (village, etc.). I think the sentence probably should be clarified to show that long-distance travel is not necessary.

Nick Levinson (talk) 15:43, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

All of these notes are VERY helpful - I'm definitely going to make some edits within the next week. Thanks! Crr4 (talk) 18:01, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

I edited the article to accommodate movement being local historically. I don't know if local-only movement occurs any more, so I maintained historicity, but I suspect it does. Nick Levinson (talk) 20:19, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Child selling

First, thanks to those undertaking the overhaul of this important article! I hope you don't mind my offering a few thoughts.

This isn't an urgent issue, but the child-selling section seems disproportionately US- and UK-centric for what I assume to be a worldwide issue, and gets a bit lost in the specifics. I'd suggest shortening the sections for these two countries radically; there's probably no need, for example, to report individual examples from EP Thompson (and even word for word dialogue from these) unless Thompson's example is uniquely famous in worldwide discussions of the topic. Georgia Tann, while obviously a notable case and worth a passing mention, probably doesn't need two full paragraphs; she's a famous trafficker, but child trafficking rings are broken up around the world every year, and we can't detail them all here... unless she's so prominent in all discussions of child trafficking that we really need every detail. Some of this could probably be usefully moved to the Tann article or Human trafficking in the United States, however. The sale by the midwife in New Orleans, etc. also seems like a level of specificity unneeded for this article; if 250,000 children are trafficked each year in Asia alone, we can't hope to list every documented case of a baby sale.

The claim that Tann made adoption socially acceptable is quite a dramatic one; is it possible to back that up from other sources? Otherwise, I'd suggest more clearly indicating in the text that this is the view of her biographer.

Hope you don't mind my throwing this picky stuff out there! Thanks for your hard work, Khazar2 (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Moving much to the human trafficking in the United States and human trafficking in the United Kingdom articles is a good idea. I didn't know those articles existed. I had created an article on child-selling and then it was proposed that it be merged into this one, which I did. In light of your suggestion, I plan to move child-selling content from this article to the other articles, to resolve the weight problem in this article. I think much of the content (e.g., specific cases and relatively casual sales without a major organization) should be in an appropriate article, since much of it makes what we're talking about particularly clear, but it need not be here. I don't think adding to the Tann article would provide sufficient context, but the new destinations would be appropriate. Once I've copied content over to the other articles, then it makes sense to substantially trim here. I plan to do this work over the next couple of weeks.

I added the attribution about socially advancing adoption.

Much more information about child-selling and other trafficking no doubt exists. I invited more research by any editors, including for globalization. That, I think, is the solution to insufficient weight to what happens in other countries. Rather than discard some of what's present from Wikipedia entirely, we should add new content in order to balance weight. While that might risk adding huge volumes, many cases probably are not reported in secondary sources, which is what Wikipedia prefers. If expansion adds little meaning we can stop adding and if expansion is meaningful perhaps we can break out separate subarticles. When we have a quantity big enough to worry about, we can decide then how to limit or organize.

Nick Levinson (talk) 14:47, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Sounds great. For the most part I agree that it's better never to lose useful content where possible; my only real concern was that without any overview statements on child-selling around the world (its frequency, geographic distribution, etc.), enumerating many cases from the US and a single undetailed case from India, for example, creates the impression for the reader that the practice is far more common in the US than other nations. That may be the case, but I'd be more comfortable if we could find some content giving a general view of the subject--definitions, history of the practice, epidemiology, country-specific law, etc.--to balance the list of individual incidents listed here. The article on murder might be a good example of this structure; rather than an enumeration of famous murders, it looks at the subject itself. The two sentences in here in China or the citations of Menelee's work do a good job of this, for example; I wonder if we could find more content like this allowing us to give a broader view of the subject. I may try to poke around and see what I can find later today. Cheers! Khazar2 (talk) 15:00, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I copied child-selling content from here to the other two articles cited above, then substantially shrank that content here. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:57, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Critique

1. I really like your ‘Related legal instruments’ subsection. Perhaps a little more explanation could be given in the intro just to summarize some of the instruments, so interested readers don’t have to go read through all of them?
2. would love to see more information on almost all of your categories in the ‘Types’ section, specifically on differences between countries
3. link to Child Begging article? I feel like the amount of information on this subject in particular is a little overwhelming.
4. possibly find American stats for the ‘Prevalence’ section?
5. I’d be interested in more development in the ‘Impacts’ section

Lots of interesting information going on in here. I’m curious if you left details out of it, because I was expecting to be a lot more disturbed, honestly. If you did want to go for some kind of emotional appeal argument, I would suggest adding more of that into the article. I didn’t catch any grammar mistakes, which is super. :) Ellyhutch (talk) 05:59, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Here are some suggestions that I have to improve your article:

• There is too much information in the lede. It should match the Wikipedia Manual of Style and just be a few sentences. Most of this information is still relevant to the article and can easily just be moved to an Overview section
• You repeat the definition of Child trafficking in the article, which I find a little redundant, but a change in the lede might fix that
• In the section of Sexual exploitation, you are missing a reference that I believe should be directly after your quotes and bullet points
• Children in drug trades has references in the middle of sentences and I believe that according to the MoS, references should all be at the end of the sentence
• In mechanisms you use numerals to start a sentence, which is considered sub-standard grammar according to several senior editors. I suggest restructuring that sentence.
• In the proposed solutions section, you don’t have a reference right after quoted material

Overall, you did a great job with the article. Hope that these edit suggestions are helpful. Cyoung530 (talk) 14:08, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I want to preface by saying that you have done such a wonderful job incorporating many key facets of this critical issue. Considering the broad scope of your entry all of the information you have provided is extremely well presented. With such an extensive article it is important to only contain the most relevant information on the topic. This is especially true when looking at the section pertaining to Child selling, which the article would be much better without considering it is not directly relevant to the topic at hand. Another section that you may want to remove is the last part of the lede, which states “Ultimately, a comprehensive understanding of child trafficking requires an accurate understanding of all of its major components, which include definitions, types, mechanisms, prevalence, impacts, and solutions.” Though it is an important point, it goes without saying and the lede should generally only include the most pertinent and basic information summarizing the issue discussed. It may also be beneficial to keep in mind that some statements may come off as personal opinion; in the Proposed solutions section, for example, this is especially important to pay attention to. Overall, you have done such an incredible job in attending to so much information on such a crucial topic! Well done! Avo92 (talk) 22:39, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Child selling is in this article because it was originally in a separate article, but a decision (originally not mine) was made that it should be moved into this article, and after that some or most of the content was moved into nation-specific articles on trafficking in the U.S. and UK, leaving a summary in this one. Because articles generally should be global in coverage, the summary, being on children, is appropriate for this article rather than the article on human trafficking generally. A summary article on child selling could be created but I think we'd need a consensus over there before reversing the prior decision. Since child selling often, albeit not always, depends on moving children some distances, it qualifies as trafficking. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:33, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Suggestions for Improvement (child begging subsection)

I really like all of your contributions to this page; I think you did a great job of covering all of your bases and including definitions, related factors, implications, and possible solutions. I have two tiny suggestions. The first relates to the formatting of the article. I would make the subsections underneath "Child begging" smaller, so that it is clear to readers which sections fall under the realm of child begging. Right now it all kind of blends into the article as a whole, so making this change would improve the article's organization. I also think it could be a valuable addition to insert a map or graph that shows the global distribution of child begging. This would make it easier for readers to visualize the extent of this unfortunate phenomenon. My edits are minor though; I think you've done fantastic in bringing more attention to this topic that is usually ignored! kebarnes91 (talk) 15:58, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I think your section of the article is very well developed and very well done. I think that the article is very well organized except for a few exceptions – first, the demographics and political factors sections appear to be very similar. Is there a way to combine the two? Also, I would organize the government response, NGO initatives sections under the International action section instead of at the same level. Finally, I would include the age of what a child is considered to be in the opening paragraph, that was the first question that popped into my head while reading this and had to wait a whole paragraph before getting it answered. Overall, I think you did an excellent job! Amacune (talk) 21:15, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

A few more things to think about:

• Consider substantiating some claims by in text citation in addition to footnotes.
• There appears to be a “bad title” under economic factors.
• Since this is under Child Trafficking, how does most of the discussion include the trafficking aspect? Does all Child begging include exploitation and transportation as is implied with trafficking? I especially lose the direct focus with the discussion of the religious influences of begging.

Cyoung530 (talk) 00:19, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey! Thank you all so much for your great input. I tried to adjust my entry accordingly, especially pertaining to providing more in text citations, clarifying information up front, and more heavily supporting the involvement of trafficking. Also, thank you so much for pointing out the "bad title" error! I can't believe I overlooked that. Let me know if you have any further suggestions and again, I really appreciate all of your help! Avo92 (talk) 00:33, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Child selling

Nick, I am in the process of conducting my final edits on this article, and (after a lot of thought, discussion, and research) I still do not think the child selling section is appropriate. Personally, I believe it can and should be deleted altogether. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that this section should be included because "the act of selling is trafficking, in and of itself." You also mentioned above that since child selling depends on moving children, it qualifies as trafficking. On these two points, I have to respectfully disagree: the internationally recognized definition of child trafficking indicates that it involves both movement and subsequent exploitation, which, in instances of child selling, is not always the case. Furthermore, even if it were the case that child selling usually leads to exploitation, this section would still be unnecessary, since it then essentially is child trafficking. In an effort to improve the quality of the section, and thus potentially keep it intact, I did conduct a bit of research on my own, and truly struggled to find legitimate sources that back up and further justify keeping the section. I also raised the issue of this "child selling" section in my class (22 students who are all currently editing Wikipedia articles related to Human Rights), and the class, along with my two professors, agreed that the section is unnecessary. I hope that this makes sense, and you agree. Thanks again for all your help on this article! Crr4 (talk) 22:45, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi there! I definitely have to agree with you that the state of the child selling section is in need of either vast improvement or removal. While the lede should be kept in place, or at the very least a short summary describing what this issue is and its extent, the sporadic use of examples currently given seems very haphazardly done and does not make for good scholarship. I would certainly be up for looking for more reliable sources along with your help to ensure that this section does not retain its current structure. Avo92 (talk) 00:25, 18 April 2012 (UTC)'

From my standpoint, it seems that child selling is not, in itself, appropriate to include in this section. Trafficking seems to necessarily include exploitative ends that are not necessarily present in the case of child selling, per se. While child selling for the purpose of sex work, forced labor etc. is appropriately under the head of "trafficking" it does not seem necessary to include a section on child selling itself on this page because child selling for these purposes is already included on this page. Further, I agree with Avo92, that the current explanation for child selling is lacking and this seems to indicate that there is little information to support this topic available. Without more information, however, I agree that it seems haphazard and out of place. In order to reconcile this issue, I wonder if it might be best to create a new page on child selling that will include more thorough research and perhaps a link to this page. I think such an effort would benefit the Wikipedia community at large by providing a source for information on this important topic, while not possibly conflating it with trafficking for necessarily exploitative purposes. Virginiawhite09 (talk) 01:42, 18 April 2012 (UTC)