Emerging Trends and Dimensions of Child Trafficking

Dear Colleagues,

We are announcing a special issue titled “Emerging Trends and Dimensions of Child Trafficking” to be published in Social Sciences. The special issue aims to develop a distinctive body of knowledge on current and emergent aspects of child trafficking insufficiently covered in the literature.

Child trafficking is about preying on vulnerable children for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation of children includes the use, procuring, or offering of a child for commercial sex or illicit activities; labor that is likely to harm the health and safety of children; and work done by children below the minimum age for admission to employment (ILO/IPEC, 2010).

Family facilitation of child sex trafficking, child cybersex trafficking, child trafficking for begging, grooming children into becoming traffickers, and the connection between child marriage and child sex trafficking, are a sample of child trafficking concerns that often receive tokenistic coverage in the literature and are scattered in various journal publications. There is also insufficient knowledge on other child trafficking issues such as the growing phenomenon of voluntourism as connected with child sexual exploitation, sociocultural dimensions of sexual exploitation of boys, and the overlooking of child pornography as commercial sexual exploitation. Thus, it is important to have a special journal issue where research on these current and emerging issues of child trafficking is comprehensively analyzed and discussed.

Potential topics for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Policy and service responses to child cybersex trafficking;
• Family-involved child prostitution;
• Sex tourism, voluntourism, and commercial sexual exploitation of children;
• Education as a risk or protective factor in child sex trafficking;
• Connection between child marriage and sex trafficking of minors;
• Sociocultural dimensions of child trafficking;
• Profile of offenders in commercial sexual exploitation of boys and LGBTQ+ youth;
• Child pornography, an overlooked form of commercial sexual exploitation of children;
• Child labor vs. child labor trafficking;
• Child trafficking for forced begging;
• Child trafficking for domestic work;
• Grooming children into becoming traffickers;
• Child sex trafficking victims' challenges in terms of access to available services and programs;
• Vicarious trauma among law enforcement investigating child pornography;
• Child trafficking in conflict and humanitarian situations.

We invite you to submit to this Special Issue your manuscript(s) discussing findings from research, program evaluations, and systematic reviews on overlooked child trafficking issues that you believe call for more attention in mainstream literature. We would also appreciate your recommending this Special Issue to your colleagues.

Please submit your proposals (including a tentative title and 200–400 words abstract and a list of 5–10 keywords) and any questions to Dr. Charles E. Hounmenou <[email protected]> by 28 February 2024.

Dr. Charles E. Hounmenou
Prof. Dr. Arun Kumar Acharya
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• child trafficking
• child labor
• exploitation
• sex trafficking
• vulnerable children