Approaches to Lao Minors Working in Thailand

Recent studies have observed in Thailand a growing number of working Lao minors. By law, these may be regarded as victims of human trafficking. This paper observes, however, that some older teenagers who are still under 18 may be seeking and finding legitimate working positions. The phenomenon of minors migrating may thus be addressed from different points of view, including a rights-based approach that takes into account the views of children themselves. The author discusses three different perspectives identified in approaches to children and teenagers in development practice. In doing so, he teases out the underlying ideas of childhood and relates them to recent empirical observations on Lao minors working in Thailand

Child trafficking

Child trafficking is often used synonymously with child labour migration. This framing does a disservice to many child migrants, who change place for many reasons, and new thinking is necessary

Children, Childhood and Migration: Some critical thoughts

__Abstract__ Limiting myself to the development literature, I first ask why it is that the issue of ‘independent child migration’ emerged as a specific field in the early 2000s even though the phenomenon itself was hardly new. I concur that its original concern was a critique to the hegemony of the child trafficking discourse, with trafficking understood as a form of boundary management within development studies’ ‘migration turn’ working to construct ‘bad’ forms and categories of mobility as separate from ‘good’ forms/categories of migration