Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents: violence and public policies

Abstract

Modern society still preserves slavery practices, human trafficking and sexual exploitation being its most cruel and inhumane form. Thus, this manuscript is the result of a research that sought to understand the relationships between public policies, collective actions, and the work of a collective that promotes the fight against trafficking in persons and the commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. To this end, in the methodological path, we resorted to two paths: bibliographic and documental research, as well as participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The first sought to recover the historical, political, and economic processes concerning trafficking in persons and sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. The second was based on the researchers' insertion in a civil society NGO. It was identified that, despite the change from the assistance/charity paradigm to the rights paradigm, the former is still present in organizations and religious groups that seek to assist people in situations of social vulnerability. This results in a paradoxical problem. On the one hand, we see the real need for practices and forms of assistance to these people. On the other hand, we also see that the offer of certain practices seeks to meet particular and market interests, aiming at profitable issues from human capital in the constitution of subjects as objects of social control and discipline, within a bio-necropolitics. Human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation are based on the foundations of structural racism, producing bodies that constitute merchandise for the necropolitics whose politics operates the same politics as those of the concentration camps.