Ghana’s Lake Volta is known as the world’s largest man-made lake. But what is almost unknown about the communities along Lake Volta is that human trafficking (child trafficking in particular) is flourishing.
Human trafficking is described by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as “an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion, or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them.”
While women and children are typically trafficked internationally within Europe (for example, from Eastern European countries to Western European countries), human trafficking in Ghana is much more of an internal concern. While many children are abducted or sold involuntarily by their parents and are then trafficked to neighbouring countries, countless children are also trafficked internally taken from rural areas of Ghana to work in fishing communities along Lake Volta or into the larger cities to work as domestic helpers, beggars and even prostitutes.
Ghana’s Central Region is also a common area for human trafficking within the country.
According to the Palermo Protocol (a protocol adopted by the United Nations in 2000, which assists in combating trafficking in persons), human trafficking not only consists of labour, but also horrific practices such as the removal of organs, trafficking for the purpose of “illicit international adoption and trafficking for early marriage and recruitment as child soldiers.”
Poverty and lack of decent education in many parts of the world are circumstances that continue to feed the human trafficking industry.
Since many parents in Ghana are unable to financially take care of their families, they believe that selling their children is the only option they have for a better life.
But what these parents do not know is that selling their children into a life of slavery is extremely dangerous. Many children do not survive and those that do often face difficult futures with psychological problems, substance abuse and continued prostitution.
Constitutional rights in Ghana include: the Right to Life, the Right to Personal Liberty, Rights of the Child, Women’s Rights, the Respect for Human Dignity and Protection from Slavery and Forced Labour. However, these rights are taken away from women and children once they fall victim to this appalling practice.
Educating parents and children about the risks of the human trafficking industry will be an important step in combating this horrific practice. Furthermore, although there are steps presently being taken to end human trafficking in Ghana (Ghana passed into law the Human Trafficking Act, Act 694 of 2005, and the Ghana Police Service has an Anti-Human Trafficking Unit), the biggest challenge will be education. If so many of the industry’s victims and their families are uneducated, how will they learn the dangers associated with such labour?
It will be up to the Ghanaian government to better protect trafficking victims and set harsher penalties for trafficking offenders. Continued help from the international community will also be necessary as Ghana continues to be a country of origin, transit and destination for trafficked women and children.
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