Eteteonline Team
Introduction
Trafficking in babies in Nigeria is now at an all-time high. This is said to be due to the steadily deteriorating economic condition in the country as a staggering faction of its populace lives below the poverty line. It is also well known that traffickers are rather responsive to demand prompting them to create new criminal schemes. The establishment of baby factories is one of the schemes devised by human traffickers to meet the demands of their patrons. There has been sluggishness on the part of the government and its citizens in the fight against this menace, as the majority are oblivious to the extent of human rights violations in this business of baby breeding for commercialization occasions. This work exposes the extent of human rights violation that the victims of this form of human trafficking who are predominantly infants and toddlers go through while answering questions that bother on whether or not babies can be said to have rights, and how humans have an intrinsic dignity that delegitimizes placing price tags on them. Furthermore, this paper proves the unjustifiability of poverty as an excuse for why people engage in heinous crimes. There are recommendations on the measures the government can take to bring a much-needed end to this immoral, illegitimate, and evil venture.
According to UNESCO (2006), in “Human Trafficking in Nigeria; Root Causes and Recommendation”, Human trafficking is ranked the third most common crime in Nigeria after financial fraud and drug trafficking. A UN report reveals that every day at least ten (10) children are reportedly being sold in Nigeria. Human trafficking is the grand underlying reason for the establishment of baby factories and the forceful abduction of women, especially teenage girls for the specific purpose of bearing babies for commercial sale.
Many have raised eyebrows as to how inhumane and barbaric some persons have become for trading in fellow humans and seriously violating others for profits. The rather disturbing and regrettable reality is that even infants are being traded either by the consent of their parents or are forcefully taken away from their mothers to be sold both locally and internationally. Some of these babies are either sold out for domestic or international abduction, rituals, slave labour, or sexual exploitation amongst others. The most disturbing part of this piece of information is that these traders pay little or no attention to the ends their human commodities serve in the hands of their customers.
This research paper, unlike other papers on human trafficking, will explain in detail the gross violation of human rights that this black business of baby production for international and domestic trade creates. Answering questions that border on whether or not a child has a right, at what age the right becomes respectable, and whether the right of a child can compete equally with their parents’ rights to use them to achieve financial gains. That is if such a right even exists.
BABY FACTORIES IN NIGERIA
Baby factories or baby harvesting are the terms used by the media to describe heinous crimes such as baby breeding, forced impregnations, sale of babies, illegal adoptions, and even human trafficking. Baby factories are usually disguised as buildings or institutions such as hospitals or orphanages that have been converted to shelters for young pregnant girls and women for delivery and selling of their offspring (Huntley 2013).
In these baby factories, young girls often unmarried and from low socio-economic backgrounds get pregnant out of wedlock, especially in cases where the men who impregnate them are refusing responsibilities and are exploited (Okoli and Okpaleke, 2014). These girls are in most instances too terrified to face society’s policing and the stigmatization that is associated with teenage pregnancy and single motherhood and as such are vulnerable to the whims and caprices of human traffickers. While some of these girls are lured unsuspectingly into the baby factories, some are either kidnapped and subsequently raped and impregnated to produce babies for supply and others willingly offer to bear babies for sale in exchange for some compensation.
The “baby factory” industry flourishes in Nigeria as confirmed by media reports of police raids on such facilities. For example, in May 2008, police rescued about 25 teenage girls from a hospital in Enugu. In June 2011, police freed 32 teenage girls from a “baby factory” located in the city of Aba, Abia state. In October 2011, 17 pregnant girls were saved from an orphanage in Lagos.53 In May 2013; police rescued 6 teenage girls from a “baby factory” in Enugu, 17 pregnant teenage girls and 11 babies in Southern Imo province, and about 26 teenage girls in Umuaka village, Imo State. In June 2013, police freed 16 pregnant young women from a clinic in Aba City, Abia State. In July 2013, police arrested the owner of the illegal home “Moonlight Maternity Home” and a nurse working for him for selling babies from unwanted pregnancies. In August and September 2013, police unveiled two more cases of baby factories in Imo State. Several “baby factories” were also reported in Anambra State. (Huntley 2013)
In Nigeria, some factors have been researched to be hugely responsible for the baby breeding business boom. They are; the premium placed on childbearing by the Nigerian society, the demonization of infertility or barrenness, and the stigmatization of single parenting and teenage pregnancies.
Interrogating why people engage in illegal trade
About 46% of the Nigerian population is said to be living below the poverty line. The most crucial factor influencing the boom of the baby breeding and trafficking business is poverty (Alfred, Francis & ale 2014). A sizeable majority of the Nigerian populace has to squeeze through the eye of a needle to get access to the bare minimum requirement for sustenance. The legal means of acquiring income seem to be so farfetched that some people choose to take the illegal route. Some individuals or groups of individuals are almost irredeemably poor as access to upward mobility, opportunities, and improved living standards seem to have been monopolized by a microscopic few. For these reasons, some young girls are easily convinced to accept the offer of bearing babies for commercial sale as an easy means of making money.
As earlier stated, the discrimination against infertile women also pushes them to patronize baby factories for the purchase of babies to save face in their immediate societies.
one might want to talk about the existence of legal adoption methods, but many times the bureaucratic bottlenecks involved in legal adoption can be discouraging, to say the least. But then it is important to interrogate whether these reasons can be said to be reasons enough.
Can these reasons be justifiable?
Can crimes be excused because circumstances pushed the criminals? Will you give a robber a pat on the back if he tells you he came to rob your home and maybe kills a relative of yours because he is poor and needs to sell some of your belongings to survive? Certainly, the answer is a ‘no’. This is because extreme economic conditions had pushed people to work in the mines and engage in other tedious but legal endeavours to survive rather than resorting to illegalities. Furthermore, should every poor person resort to crime as an option for attaining financial security, especially in a country like ours that has the vast majority of her populace living below the poverty line,
In all, the question to ask is should there be limits to the free markets? Are there things that we must not commodify?
Firstly, as humans, people possess conventional codes of morals, beliefs, and values and there is a need for our markets to operate along the lines of ethical values and virtues as Adam Smith explained in his Theory of moral sentiments. Albeit Adam Smith was a proponent of a free market that is with very infinitesimal restrictions and interventions. After the 1776 “Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, a host of other scholars preached for a more expanded role of governments’ intervention in markets.
Advocates of an expanded role for the state include Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx and such twentieth-century advocates as Abba Lerner, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Robert Heilbroner. These scholars argue that free markets lead to monopolies, chronic economic crises, income inequality, and increasing degradation of the poor and that centralized political control of people’s economic lives avoids these problems of the marketplace. They deem economic life simply too important to be left up to the decentralized decisions of individuals. (R.A Lawson 2003)
Secondly, Nigeria has ratified or acceded to most of the important international instruments fighting against human trafficking and protecting women and children. Among them are the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (2000) and the Palermo Protocol (2000), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the optional protocol to the sale of children, Child prostitution, and Child pornography (2000), the ICC statue (2000), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) and the Optional Protocol to it (1999), and the United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of slavery, the slave trade and institution and practices to slavery (1956).
As a state that is a party to the aforementioned treaties, there is a need to take serious action against the promulgation of acts of trafficking or acts complementing it. Criminalizing acts like the abduction and sale of children for illegal adoption, the exploitation of women and children, illegal transfer and non-return of children abroad, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, and any other form of exploitation, to ensure that children are not separated from their parents against their will, to design and implement programs to eliminate the sale, trafficking and forced labour of children. (Huntley2013)
Are there things we must not commoditize or put a price on?
This question brings to life the concept of Human dignity that distinguishes animals from humans. That is, the intrinsic value and the very humanity of human beings whether young or old.
It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to justify human rights without making some reference, at least implicitly, to the idea of human dignity. This notion is usually associated with the supreme importance, fundamental value, and inviolability of the human person (Andorno 2002). This intrinsic value on humans means that it becomes immoral to attach a price to the worth of a human person. In the realm of ends, everything has either a price or an intrinsic value. Anything with a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent, whereas anything that is above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has intrinsic value (Kant 2008, 33, emphasis original).
Things can be bought or sold therefore they have a price and are replaceable by other things of the same price; persons cannot be bought or sold therefore they have no price and are not replaceable. They, and only they, have dignity. By their nature, things are entities that can be instrumentalized; persons should not, as the second formula of the categorical imperative states: Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means (Kant 2008, 29). Persons should not be used as mere means to an end, that is, persons should not be instrumentalized. (B. Baertschi 2014). Animals serve anthropocentric benefits to humans the same way humans use things to satisfy ends that satisfy them and make them more comfortable, and as such we can place a price tag on animals.
The question as to how come the intrinsic value can be answered thus; the fact that man is aware of an ego-concept raises him infinitely above all other creatures living on earth. Because of this, he is a person. … He is a being who, because of his pre-eminence and dignity, is wholly different from things, such as the irrational animals, which he can master and rule at will (Kant 1978, 9). All these are proof that it is entirely immoral to place price tags on people or to sell them as things or animals.
Why slave trade was abolished
Creating a reminder of the major reasons for the abolition of the slave trade will further establish how baby factory operators violate rights. It was because people realized that it was unfair to be able to buy human beings from the slave markets as though they were buying camels or donkeys for domestic use. It was a regrettable loss of humanity for a human to claim possession and ownership over another human
Children’s right to human dignity
In human rights law and documents such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), it is assumed that every human being, including children, has inherent dignity. The key to the human rights approach is that children must be accorded the inherent dignity of all members of the human community. This not only addresses the unequal treatment that children are subjected to but also anchors this in the larger understanding that inherent dignity is a quality of all life. Being treated with dignity and respect is not a privilege to be earned and guarded. It is the birthright of all members of the human community. In its preamble, the CRC begins with the “recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world…”
Throughout its preamble and in its articles, the CRC makes many references to concepts related to the idea of human dignity and children. These provisions may be classified into two groups: (1) those provisions that attempt to ensure a social responsibility for the nurturing of human dignity in children and (2) those that aim to prevent violations of children’s dignity.
Regarding the category of “nurturing dignity” the CRC states, for example, that governments (state parties) must seek to ensure the care necessary for the child’s wellbeing; that governments must use their best efforts to ensure that the best interest of the child is the basic concern of the parents; that children should be treated with humanity and respect; and that government must take all appropriate measures to promote the recovery of victims of child maltreatment. Regarding the category of “protecting children from violation of dignity”, the CRC states that all state parties must take every measure-legislative, administrative, social, and educational- ” to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse”; and that state parties shall ensure that ” no child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Now that it has been established that placing a price tag on a human life constitutes a fundamental assault on the very humanity of any person and dilutes the intrinsic value of the human life and that babies and children are born with intrinsic dignity, we can now move on to investigating and highlighting the levels of human right violation that the baby factory business creates. But before we do that, let us attempt to thicken the dichotomy between self-enslavement (that is, when conscious adults agree to slave themselves and labour extraneously under unfavourable or maybe favourable conditions for pay) and the sale of children to buyers who use them as a means of achieving their various ends (which is also slavery).
Children’s inability to give consent and how it delegitimizes child slavery
Consent is a legal term that means to give assent or approval. In Nigeria, an individual cannot consent for him or herself until he or she is 18. This is also the case with many states. For international studies, some cultures may accept that an individual may consent for him or herself at an earlier age, or may require parental consent past 18 years.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it clear that if you are under 18 you should not have to do jobs that harm or exploit you. According to the convention, harmful job is defined as jobs that:
• damages your health and development
• causes you physical or emotional stress
• prevents you from getting an education
• prevents you from having time to rest and play.
Exploitative job is such that:
• you are forced to do
• involves buying or selling children (child trafficking)
• involves being prostituted or used in pornography
• takes away your dignity and self-esteem
• does not pay fairly.
Children, according to the International Labour Organization Convention can be engaged in activities that do not violate the aforementioned conditions from the age of 13 (or as young as 12 in countries at a lower level of development) as long as it does not interfere with their education.
Child trafficking falls under exploitative forms of child engagement and since the child cannot give valid consent to participate, it becomes highly immoral to put them through such dehumanizing engagements.
This explains why even though earlier in this paper it was highlighted that people already enslave themselves in various ways which is very questionable, it becomes highly unacceptable when children are dehumanized or sold into slavery. This is because children cannot give consent or weigh the harms inherent in such activities. People who use children or exploit them as means towards attaining their ends are committing crimes against humanity by dehumanizing them and using them as mere things or possessions.
Baby breeding and trading: A violation of human rights
It is important to highlight the levels of human rights violations that are inherent in baby breeding and the baby factory business generally.
- Violation of the child’s right to Human Dignity: The business of baby breeding involves placing a monetary price on children and reducing their intrinsic worth to some arbitrary consideration. As established earlier in this paper, humans are not to be commoditized and traded because they possess intrinsic value and any action that commoditizes children dilutes their intrinsic worth.
- Violation of the child’s right to freedom from exploitation: children that are victims of child trafficking from baby breeding factories are often sold out for domestic or international abduction, rituals, slave labour, or sexual exploitation amongst others. According to the Convention on the Rights of a Child, as has been highlighted earlier in this paper, children should not be made to engage in activities that exploit them. That is, activities that involve auctioning of children for financial gains and or the giving away of children to be enslaved or used by others to serve ends like illegal adoption, slave labour, sexual exploitation or to be used for rituals
- Violation of the child’s right to not be separated from their parent against their will: Article 9(1) of the Convention on the Rights of a Child States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, by applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child. Such determination may be necessary in a particular case such as one involving abuse or neglect of the child by the parents, or one where the parents are living separately and a decision must be made as to the child’s place of residence. This makes any form of forceful separation of a child from their parent a violation of his/her rights.
- Violation of the child’s right to legal adoption: Article 21 of the CRC states that state parties that recognize and/or permit the system of adoption shall ensure that the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration and they shall:
- Ensure that the adoption of a child is authorized only by competent authorities who determine, by applicable law and procedures and based on all pertinent and reliable information, that the adoption is permissible given the child’s status concerning parents, relatives, and legal guardians and that if required, the persons concerned have given their informed consent to the adoption based on such counseling as may be necessary;
The (d) part of the article states that concerned parties Take all appropriate measures to ensure that, in inter-country adoption, the placement does not result in improper financial gain for those involved in it;
- Violation of the rights of girls and women in instances of forceful abduction: Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in sub-section 1 states expressly that everyone lawfully within a territory of a state shall, within that territory, have a right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his or her residence and in subsection 3 it states, that the above-mentioned rights shall not be subjected to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order, public health or morals or the rights and freedom of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present covenant. This renders illegal any act of illegally confining women and young girls to any place against their will.
Legal framework
According to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, any treaty will be enforceable in Nigeria only if it is passed into law by the National Assembly. Nigeria enacted the following laws combating human trafficking: Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law Enforcement and Administration Act 2003 and Child Rights Act 2003. Various aspects of human trafficking are also covered by Nigerian Criminal and Penal Codes. Further, the Nigerian supreme law, the Constitution, prohibits slavery, servitude, inhuman or degrading treatment, and forced labour. (Huntley 2013)
The Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law Enforcement and Administration Act 2003 (Trafficking Act 2003) defines human trafficking, criminalizes offences related to human trafficking, and establishes the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and other related matters (NAPTIP) to combat this phenomenon.
Though the Trafficking Act 2003 primarily combats trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation, including prostitution and pornography, some of its provisions may also be related to human trafficking for “baby harvesting.” For example, one of the purposes of human trafficking included in the definition of this crime is involuntary reproductive servitude. Further, among the criminalized offences are the sale of children for exploitation or other immoral purposes; accepting, receiving, or detaining a person against that person’s will as a slave, holding or possessing any person as a slave; and procuring a child to have sexual intercourse with a man including by use of threats, intimidation, fraud or administration of drugs. The punishment for these offences varies from imprisonment from 10 years to a life sentence with or without an option of a fine. (Huntley 2013)
The CRC expressly highlights the inalienable rights of a child and spells out punishments for its violation while explaining in detail the obligation of states to ensure the protection of these rights. It expressly criminalizes the transfer and non-return of children abroad in Article 11 and explains everything that involves the illegality of all that the baby factory and baby breeding industry stands for.
Conclusion
The regrettable proliferation of baby breeding factories across the country has seen the gross violation of the rights of its victims. From the assault on the intrinsic dignity of children to the assault on the consent and freedom of movement and association of forcefully abducted women and girls, the existence of baby factories needs to be terminated as soon as possible. Baby factory is both a profitable illegal “business” and a new trend in human trafficking in Nigeria that is widely spread and allegedly operated by organized criminal syndicates. This phenomenon poses a great challenge for the Nigerian Government to eradicate it. Though Nigeria has already undertaken several legislative and other measures to address the human trafficking problem within its borders, some of them had been introduced before the emergence of “baby factories.” Therefore, it is unlikely that they will be effective in fighting this form of human trafficking. As such, the government and its agencies need to intensify efforts aimed at combating and bringing a complete end to this menace.
Recommendations
- There is a need to emphasize to people through sensitization campaigns that the slave trade is still very much alive in Nigeria through the advances of baby factories. People need to be enlightened on the varying forms of human rights violations that the baby factory business occasions, to ensure all hands are on deck in the fight against this menace.
- There is a need for the government to differentiate between child trafficking and the human trafficking of adults so that specific resources can be channeled into combating child trafficking and the closures of baby factories.
- The Nigerian government to ratify more of the conventions that protect children from abuse and violation as this may help establish transparent mechanisms for adoptions, as well as improve policies and legislation in this field. Conventions such as the Hague Convention No. 33 on the protection of children and cooperation in respect of inter-country adoption (1993) should be ratified.
- Government needs to respond to the issue of poverty and economic hardship by re-examining programs addressing poverty and illiteracy in Nigeria as these are the underlying factors influencing the admission of people into the baby factory occupation.
- NGOs and International Organisations are further encouraged to conduct more detailed research related to the “baby factory” phenomenon for its better understanding and finding effective solutions to combat it. In particular, a thorough investigation of the following aspects of this crime is recommended: the demand side of “baby factories,” destination countries for babies upon their sale, the approximate number of victims of “baby factories” (including biological mothers and their babies), the correlation between traffickers operating “baby factories” and organized criminal groups, and countries where such traffickers engage in criminal activities. The findings of such research could be useful not only to Nigeria but also to countries where reports of similar activities have surfaced.
References
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