April 16 is the World Day Against Child Slavery. This date is intended to remind about one of the darkest forms of modern violence, which still persists in the world, despite loud declarations, laws, conventions and programs for the protection of children’s rights, as well as numerous fruitless international round tables and forums. Despite technological advances and growing global awareness, millions of children remain victims of exploitation—in quarries, on agricultural plantations, in garment factories, on city streets, and even in digital space. This is not just an echo of the past that could not be stopped, but the brutal reality of the present, where the vulnerability of childhood becomes a commodity.
How children remain slaves in a global system of coercion
April 16 is a date that does not have an official international status, but is marked in the memory of tens of thousands of people. On this day, the world remembers Iqbal Masih, a boy who at the age of 12 became a symbol of resistance to child exploitation and was killed for his outspokenness. His life is a story of struggle, as well as complete powerlessness before the mechanisms of slavery, which did not disappear in the 21st century, but only “disguised” in new forms.
Despite the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, commitments by governments and global campaigns, child exploitation continues on a large scale in today’s world. According to the estimates of the International Labor Organization, more than 160 million children in the world are forced to work, that is, every tenth child. At the same time, about 70% of them are employed in dangerous conditions: these are illegal mines, agriculture with pesticides, workshops without ventilation, construction sites without any safety measures. At the same time, slavery is not only physical labor. Sexual exploitation, forced marriages, recruitment of children into armed conflicts, use for begging or the gruesome trade in organs – all these practices continue to exist in the shadows.
World indicators look like a chronicle of shame. Every year, more than 20,000 children die at work. One in four victims of human trafficking is a child. In more than 130 countries, child labor is commonplace and sometimes even expected. In West Africa, children work on cocoa plantations, in Bangladesh – in textile factories, where seven-year-old children sew clothes for global brands for 12 hours a day. In Congo, Myanmar and other countries, children are used as intelligence agents and suicide bombers. At the same time, in Nepal, which has one of the largest programs to combat child slavery, more than 13,000 minors have been rescued in the last five years alone. But this is a drop in the ocean.
The number of children in slavery is difficult to estimate precisely, because a large part remains invisible – to the police, social services, school systems. Their names do not make it into reports, and their stories do not make it into journalistic investigations. It is this invisibility, when the child does not appear in any protection system, and its exploitation goes unnoticed, that is one of the most dangerous aspects of modern slavery. The world is trading their time, their bodies, and their right to vote. And the crime is not always in the form of shackles, sometimes it is simply economic impasse, lack of documents or loss of trust in any institutions.
Child slavery in Ukraine
The situation in Ukraine is no exception either. According to the Global Slavery Index, even before the full-scale war, Ukraine ranked 49th among 167 countries. Approximately every sixth out of a thousand Ukrainians had experience of slavery or forced labor. And among these people are children.
In modern Ukraine, child slavery has long ceased to be an abstract term from textbooks or a fragment of distant exoticism. It is a phenomenon that is happening here and now — at the intersection of economic decline, social confusion, war destruction, and institutional weakness. And the worst thing is that more and more often children find themselves in its epicenter. Thus, in 2022, the National Police of Ukraine documented 323 facts of human trafficking, identified 241 victims in criminal proceedings related to human trafficking, 104 of them were men, 100 were women, 37 were children, including 23 minors. Since the beginning of 2024, the status of a victim of human trafficking has been established for 119 citizens, of which 44 are women, 65 are men, and 10 are children (5 boys and 5 girls).
Ukrainian realities do not differ from the global logic of slavery: the main forms of exploitation are forced labor, involvement in the sex industry, begging, recruitment into armed groups, and use in the trade of organs. For each of these items, there are specific facts, figures, court cases, and names that remain behind the news.
There are many examples of child slavery. Here is just one of them, which caused a stir not only because of the number of minors, but also because of the details. In Georgia, a citizen of Ukraine tried to illegally take out a dozen children, passing them off as her own. Four children, according to her documents, were born in the same year. This raised suspicions of trafficking for the purpose of reselling children — perhaps for sexual exploitation or even organ transplants. The children were reportedly in critical condition. And although the investigation is still ongoing, the very fact of conspiracy at the level of motherhood and child trafficking is impressive.
However, the problem is not limited to cases of export abroad. According to data from the International Organization for Migration, 66% of Ukrainian teenagers aged 13 to 20 are ready to accept a risky offer that could potentially lead to slavery. That is, two out of three are not victims of chance, but potential candidates for an exploitation system that works clearly, efficiently and with huge profits.
This is not surprising if you consider the factors that shape this risk. And poverty is one of the most powerful. It breeds indifference, pushes to despair, destroys moral guidelines. In such conditions, even parents sometimes become sellers of their own children. Not because of pathological evil, but because of the cold economy of survival. At the same time, teenagers themselves, deprived of basic knowledge about danger, are easily led by promises of earnings or “opportunities”.
Parental indifference and social negligence are also the cause of serious crimes against children. When the adults responsible for the child’s safety neglect it knowingly or out of indifference, the child finds himself in a situation where his body, work, and trust become a resource for trade. Slavery does not begin at the moment of abduction or transportation across the border, but where the child is left alone. In addition, in many cases it is the parents who become intermediaries who hand over the child to exploiters for money. At the same time, social services do not intervene, schools lose contact, and the state loses control. Where there is no concern, demand begins. And slavery, as a reaction to this void, fills it without too much effort.
An additional factor in child slavery now is the war, which creates a fog of legal chaos, especially in the frontline regions and temporarily occupied territories. Since 2015, international organizations have documented the large-scale forced deportation of women residents of the occupied Donbas to the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia. Often with the involvement of minors. This was openly stated, in particular, by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Serhii Kyslytsia at a meeting of the UN Security Council. The situation only worsened after 2022. Ukrainian children who found themselves abroad unaccompanied by adults or in unstable families became easy targets.
Another layer of the problem is social isolation and “idling”. According to the research, the most vulnerable are teenagers who do not study or work anywhere. They are removed from the system that could protect them: they do not have access to a school, a psychologist, or a social worker. They are of no interest to anyone – and that is why they are the most interesting for human traffickers.
All this is superimposed on one more circumstance — deep ignorance of children about real risks. For most of them, slavery is something fictional, cinematic, distant. They think that it can happen somewhere in Sudan or Pakistan, but certainly not in Kharkiv or Uzhhorod. Therefore, when they are offered a job in Poland, an escort in the Czech Republic, or training in Turkey with “small side conditions”, they rarely ask for too much.
The authorities are trying to respond to this phenomenon. Since 2018, the Criminal Code of Ukraine has a strengthened article on child trafficking: from 8 to 15 years of imprisonment. In October 2023, these norms were clarified and strengthened even more, but the effectiveness of the punishment depends not only on the strictness of the legislation. The main thing is inevitability. And, as practice shows, public opinion, media coverage, judicial control — all this is of great importance, because without resonance, most such cases quietly disappear into the statistics.
Another line of struggle against this shameful phenomenon is prevention. She is chosen by a part of the progressive civil society. In particular, the online education studio EdEra, together with the OSCE, developed a course “Human rights in the educational space” aimed at teachers. Its goal is to integrate knowledge about human rights into all school subjects, so that anti-slavery is not a separate lesson once a year, but part of everyday learning. Because slavery does not begin with shackles, but with ignorance, poverty, loss of subjectivity.
However, Ukraine still does not have a full-fledged and effective state program to combat child trafficking. There are fragmentary initiatives, a legislative framework and some court practices. For example, the State Targeted Social Program for Combating Human Trafficking for the period up to 2025 is still in effect from June 2, 2023. No. 496-r, approved by the order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, which contains general provisions and does not even mention child slavery. As a result, we have chaos: partial measures, random disclosures, lack of a stable support system for affected children, weak monitoring abroad and lack of precedent decisions and effective measures.
So, modern child slavery in Ukraine does not look like a Hollywood horror, it does not need dark basements, but hides in smartphones, Facebook groups, unemployment, promises, in the fatigue of adults and the silence of teenagers, and that is why it is so dangerous. This phenomenon is the result of deep socio-economic gaps, when institutions are unable to protect the most vulnerable, and global markets are able to monetize even childhood. Its causes are systemic poverty, the destruction of state functions, armed conflicts, gaps in education and upbringing, and the inaccessibility of legal protection. In this reality, the child becomes a resource – cheap, docile, unprotected.
Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Child Slavery, behind the shadowy numbers and faceless statistics there is one harsh truth: slavery has not disappeared, but has become more complex and less visible. The relevance of this topic today lies not in the memory of the past, but in the obligation to honestly look into the eyes of the present. Fighting child slavery requires an effective legal system, public acceptance, political will and strict accountability, otherwise tens of millions of children will remain just numbers in reports.
