Intersections in 'trafficking' and 'child sexual exploitation' policy

Trafficking and child sexual exploitation (CSE) are two policy areas whose histories are intertwined with processes of modernity and late-modernity. They have both been recognised as global social problems of alarming proportions requiring urgent and immediate action to eradicate them. These concerns have translated into a range of preventative and protective measures to ensure the well-being of those identified as ‘vulnerable’ to such ‘risks’ and prosecuting and punishing those who commit these heinous acts. Trafficking and CSE are constructed as risks that threaten the breakdown of social order and disturb the core notions which have come to govern our world: free/ unfree, adult/child, sexual/asexual, deserving/undeserving, legal/ illegal, victim/perpetrator (O’Connell-Davidson, 2005). But, as this chapter shows, trafficking and CSE emerged as social problems precisely in contexts where these problems could be articulated as such (Aradau, 2008: 14). It focuses on how trafficking and CSE came to be defined as global social problems and reviews some of the incongruities present in some of the initiatives implemented to address them.