(iPoster) Legacies of Civil War and Anti-Human Trafficking Legislation in Sierra Leone

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Emerging Issues in US State Politics & Genocide, Trafficking, and Climate Change: Quest for Justice
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Genocide, Trafficking, and Climate Change: Quest for Justice

Abstract

In 2022, the government of Sierra Leone enacted the Anti-Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Act, which established more robust tools for the prosecution and punishment of human traffickers as well as the protection of survivors, witnesses, and children. I consider the legacy of the Sierra Leone civil war (1991-2002) on child trafficking in the country, and whether the 2022 law impacted that legacy. I conducted 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, 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 civil war close to each household surveyed. I then 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 new law has shown some early impact in weakening these local civil war legacies.

Author

• Unregistered Participant