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(iPoster) Legacies of Civil War and Anti-Human Trafficking Legislation in Sierra Leone
Thu, September 11, 3:00 to 3:30pm PDT (3:00 to 3:30pm PDT), TBAAbstract
In 2022, the government of Sierra Leone enacted the Anti-Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Act, a significant reform in the African country's anti-human trafficking efforts. The law established more robust tools for the prosecution and punishment of human traffickers and migrant smugglers, as well as the protection of survivors, witnesses, and in particular children. I consider the legacy of the Sierra Leone civil war (1991-2002) on the prevalence of child trafficking in the country, and whether the 2022 law has already produced some impact in weakening that legacy. I conduct that study with data collected in the three districts of the Eastern Province in Sierra Leone by the University of Georgia's Center on Human Trafficking and Research Outreach (CenHTRO), in partnership with Conflict Management and Development Associates in Sierra Leone (CMDA-SL). We fielded two identical surveys, before and after the enacting of the 2022 law (a baseline survey in 2021, an endline survey in 2024), where we found a sharp decline in child trafficking prevalence across the three districts of the Easter Province during that period.
I cross-reference these data with an existing geocoded dataset of political violence events, Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)'s Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), to map the number of civilian casualties in the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002) in the local communities of each household surveyed. With that integrated dataset I analyze the relationship between local legacies of violence against civilians in the civil war and instances of children becoming trafficking victims. In particular, comparing baseline and endline data, I can assess whether the 2022 has already shown some early impact in weakening these local civil war legacies.