CHILDREN’S advocate and national rapporteur on trafficking in persons Diahann Gordon-Harrison has bemoaned the level of misconceptions among Jamaicans about what constitutes child trafficking and pointed out that minors can be trafficked inside their homes without being moved anywhere.

At the same time, a police detective is saying law enforcers are concerned by an emerging trend with parents becoming the main actors in child trafficking, by taking and selling nude photos of children.

Both Gordon-Harrison and Detective Sergeant Kevin Strachan were guests on the Early Childhood Commission Child Rights Series 2025 on Tuesday evening.

“For trafficking to occur, movement doesn’t have to happen. And so many times I say that the use of the word trafficking is a misnomer because when you think trafficking, you think movement, but a child can be exploited right in their very place of residence. They don’t have to be moved to another location. So trafficking is really the exploitation of a child for the benefit of another person,” Gordon-Harrison explained.

Noting that the main forms of child trafficking seen in Jamaica currently involve the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and forced labour cases, the children’s advocate said locally held myths about what constitutes trafficking have resulted in big misses.

“One is that trafficking only happens to persons, or to children rather, who live in poor areas, poor communities or rural areas. That’s definitely a myth. Another one is that trafficking, when it comes on to children, is always about sexual exploitation. If you ask the man in the street to define what human trafficking or child trafficking is, they say, ‘Oh, it’s when people having sex, man, and so on and so forth’. So, we’re not paying attention to the other forms of exploitation that children can be exposed to,” she told the forum.

She said another commonly held misconception is that “only strangers are traffickers”.

“[It is felt] children can’t be trafficked by people who know them or family members. And so that’s a myth. Another one has to do with this thing that if the child consents it means that the child is precocious and, as we say in Jamaican parlance, very ‘force ripe’, and so that can’t be trafficking because the child was up to it and the child was a ‘bad pickney’ from a long time anyway so it’s not trafficking. And of course, tied to the movement issue is that it only happens across borders. So, you can only be trafficked if you’re moved from Jamaica to another country. So, we’re not even recognising intra-parish and inter-parish trafficking of our people,” she said further.

Gordon-Harrison added that another “big miss” for Jamaica is that “when we get persons to recognise that yes, there’s child trafficking and human trafficking here, sometimes they automatically think of Jamaica as what we call a source country, that people are taken from Jamaica, snuck out and exploited elsewhere, but we’re not thinking that Jamaica also serves as a destination country for traffickers. And what that means is that persons in Jamaica traffic children into the island and exploit them here. So we always think about trafficking from, I think, the Jamaican being the victim and so our Jamaican people are disappearing, and so on. So they’re being trafficked. But we’re not looking for local scenarios where children who are living in communities and in our midst could be victims of trafficking, who have been brought from overseas and are being exploited here,” she outlined.

According to the children’s advocate, in many instances a lack of analysis has resulted in situations which qualify as child trafficking being overlooked.

“Sometimes we don’t look at a situation for what it is and do the analysis. If we go back to the definition of what child trafficking is, where a child is exploited for the benefit of another — whether that is financial benefit or some other advantage — and when you think, for example, of what is recognised in other jurisdictions as forced criminality, we have it here but we’re not recognising it,” the children’s advocate maintained.

“…Sometimes, because of a lack of analysis, we miss it even though it’s staring us in the face,” she added.

As to whether she was aware of instances in which children were trafficked out of the country and have returned, Gordon-Harrison said, “I certainly know of a few instances where that has been suspected, but in terms of them returning to the country, I’m not aware of that. But I do know of instances where Jamaican children have been trafficked out, which is why Jamaica is classified as a source country, as well, for human trafficking.”

Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Strachan said, “One of the trends we realise now is that parents or guardians or friends will take nude pictures of a child and sell them. Now, that is a form of trafficking. Once you take nude pictures of these children and you sell these and benefit from them, that is exploiting the child. If you’re found in possession of these videos or pictures, then you can be charged under the pornography Act and also human trafficking. So those are also other forms as we are saying that it doesn’t have to be out of the home. It can happen same place in the home,” he pointed out.

He recalled a case in which a parent unknowingly exposed a child to an old man who was posing as a younger individual.

“Parents will send nude pictures of their children to other persons; we had a case and when it was borne out, this man was in his 60s, but what he did is, he put up fake pictures of himself,” the cop said.

According to Strachan, easy access to the Internet and social media has increased the likelihood of children being trafficked.

“We have seen where more and more the reaching of victims is done by the Internet and as I speak to an international case, it was on
Facebook that the trafficker [met this child]. She was from Guyana and she communicated with the trafficker who somehow communicated with also the parent and convinced the parent that she was taking the child here to actually give her a vacation. The child had never left her space before and so they come to an agreement and actually end up here. So yes, it is a major impact in recruitment of children,” he stated.

In the meantime, he said, while a number of reports of child trafficking are received yearly not all pan out when investigated.

“We’ll have about roughly four cases per year over the last probably 10 years as it relates to child trafficking on average and we have some other investigations ongoing as it relates to that because you know investigations do take time,” he said.

Their observations came hours after Supreme Court judge Justice Bertram Morrison sentenced a 44-year-old St Catherine-based taxi driver, who pleaded guilty to routinely raping and trafficking his underage daughter and stepdaughter over several years, to more than three decades behind bars for those crimes. The man was also slapped with a similar sentence for raping another child, his next-door neighbour, around the same period of time. The sentences for the crimes against all three girls amount to just over 100 years. However, the sentences will run concurrently, making it so that he will serve the longest of the lot, which is 33 years and eight months behind bars, before he can apply for parole.

According to the United States Department 2024 trafficking in persons report for Jamaica, officials opened investigations into 61 cases, 48 involving sex trafficking, six involving labour trafficking, and seven involving unspecified forms of trafficking. It said this was comparable to the previous reporting period, when officials opened investigations into 60 cases (55 involving sex trafficking and five involving labour trafficking).

GORDON HARRISON… a child can be exploited right in their very place of residence; they don’t have to be moved to another location