Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at violence enacted by humanitarian actors and police in the name of caring for ‘child slaves’ in the fishing sector in Ghana, and the competing visions of freedom, sociality, care, civility, and childhood at play in contestations around these efforts to tackle ‘child slavery’.

Paper long abstract:

US- and British-based antislavery campaigners have called for urgent action against ‘child slavery’ in global south countries, and in Ghana over the past decade various humanitarian NGOs have worked with the Police Service and other government agencies on interventions to liberate and rehabilitate ‘trafficked’ and ‘enslaved’ children. These actions include the threatened and actual use of violence to remove children, the criminalisation of survival strategies used by people living in poverty, and the institutionalisation of children, leading to separation from kin for protracted time periods. Drawing on research on antislavery NGOs and the impact of their interventions on remote island fishing communities on Lake Volta, this paper considers the violence enacted in the name of caring for ‘child slaves’ and the competing visions of freedom, sociality, care, civility, and childhood that are at play in efforts to tackle ‘child slavery’ and resistance to such efforts on the part of communities affected. It explores the fact that whilst Ghanaian humanitarian actors do not necessarily view the problem in the same light as do US-based NGOs and their donors, but for a variety of reasons, many nonetheless, either willingly or unwillingly, participate in the ‘rescue missions’, forced institutionalisation of children, violence against rural communities and other punitive ‘humanitarian’ interventions which the study identified within the Ghanaian child labour abolitionist landscape.