What happens after a child escapes from slavery? How can shattered innocence be restored? This photographic project by Ana Palacios documents the experience of thousands of children who are bought and sold as slaves in West Africa, the region with the world’s highest rate of child labour. Her work shows that there is a way out for these victims of modern slavery, a “back door” which some of them manage to find, open and step through to live their lives in freedom.
This awareness-raising project documents the experience of children victims of human trafficking as they are rehabilitated and returned to their families in Western Africa, the region of the world with highest rate of child trafficking.
Human trafficking for the purposes of exploitation is a very serious human rights violation that constitutes a form of modern slavery.
Thousands of minors are trafficked each year on the west coast of Africa, sold off by their families for ridiculous sums, at most the equivalent of 30€ and the false promise of a better life that translates into conditions of slave labor, working from sunrise to sunset, spending years away from their homeland and their family.
The root causes of child trafficking are extreme poverty; the slave-owning tradition that, for centuries, prevailed in the region; and other age-old traditions that promote child migration. The phenomenon is grounded on the social inequality and injustice that taints people's legitimate desire to migrate in search of a better life. All these reasons, combined with ignorance about the rights of children, make it a socially accepted phenomenon, and this makes it harder to eradicate.Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly West Africa, also has the highest incidence of child trafficking in the world.
This project arises from the need to document the current state of child trafficking in West Africa from an new angle.
The aim is to look at child trafficking, not from the point of view of the trafficking problem itself--as many great essays have already been written about it--, but rather by highlighting the personal stories of children who have been rescued, focusing on analyzing how these children experience the process of rehabilitation and reintegration.
The author has traveled to Benin on two occasions (2015 and 2016) and to Togo on one occasion (2016).