This chapter explores issues of children’s agency and participation in anti-trafficking interventions with children trafficked for exploitative labor in Vietnam. In particular, the chapter focuses on the ways children leave labor trafficking situations through outside interventions in the form of rescue and its associated rehabilitation and reintegration programs offered to rescue victims.
The findings of this study reveal that the specificities of the local context, the counter-trafficking actors involved, and the sector in which trafficking takes place are all important to consider in evaluating the salience of rescue-centered approaches in counter-trafficking and children’s agency in these processes. From a policy perspective, it is suggested here that a greater degree of attention to be paid to modes and motivations of exiting work for migrant child laborers, which will balance the current emphasis on motivations and arrangements in migrating for work. It is further suggested that policy makers, as well as the scholarly community, look to models of child participation in trafficking interventions, which demonstrate that anti-trafficking measures do not always deny agency to child migrants.