Child trafficking in West Africa has increasingly been framed as a singular criminal phenomenon, detached from the complex socio-cultural, economic, and historical realities that shape children’s mobility, labour participation, and kinship-based care arrangements. Drawing exclusively on interdisciplinary scholarship and policy-oriented literature, this article offers an extensive theoretical and analytical interrogation of dominant trafficking discourses, with particular emphasis on Ghana, Nigeria, and the wider West African sub-region. It argues that prevailing global and national anti-trafficking frameworks often obscure children’s agency, misrecognise culturally embedded practices such as fostering and labour migration, and produce unintended harms through criminalisation and rescue-oriented interventions. By synthesising perspectives from childhood studies, feminist political economy, human rights law, migration studies, and critical criminology, the article demonstrates how binaries such as victim versus agent, trafficking versus migration, and protection versus exploitation are analytically insufficient.
The methodology is grounded in qualitative meta-synthesis of peer-reviewed research, international reports, and legal analyses, allowing for a nuanced reconstruction of empirical patterns and conceptual debates without reliance on primary field data. The findings reveal persistent tensions between international legal instruments, national enforcement regimes, and everyday survival strategies of families and children under conditions of structural poverty and inequality. The discussion highlights how anti-trafficking campaigns, celebrity advocacy, and visual propaganda contribute to moral panics, while often marginalising children’s own voices and lived experiences. The article concludes by proposing a reconceptualisation of child trafficking that foregrounds interdependence, social reproduction, and contextual agency, and calls for policy approaches that move beyond punitive logics towards rights-based, child-centred, and structurally informed responses.
