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This article explores the role of agency in determining who is and is not considered to be a legitimate victim of human trafficking. It draws on critical human trafficking scholarship and research on the life chances of West African youth. This is complemented by qualitative data from youth embroiled in football‐related human trafficking. The insights from these analyses are brought into conversation with theoretical work on the geographies of commodities. This results in the concept of "the football trafficking fetish," which is used to theorise how and why the agency of mobile youthful African male bodies undermines their claims of being trafficked human beings. The findings that emerge are significant in two ways. First, they generate theoretical insights on the coexistence of agency and exploitation in young lives and how young people's aspirations and agency can be (mis)read and work against them. Second, they provide a unique illustration of how human trafficking is a product of capitalism yet can be presented as a form of behaviour that lies outside of capitalist social relations. To centre these social relations and foster new forms of critical dialogue within and beyond population geography, the article concludes by recommending we consider the implications of conceptualising people as susceptible to rather than vulnerable to human trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines children's engagement with the increasingly global and commercialised football industry. By combining a Global Production Network approach and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child it is argued that, for children's rights and best interests to be better upheld and realised within the football industry, regulatory conditions need to account for geographical contextuality and incorporate scope for children to inform regulatory frameworks and practice. The paper highlights the importance of designing and implementing research that recognises and operationalises children's agency, which can both inform and influence regulations and practices, better to reflect children's best interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses in‐depth qualitative data, obtained as part of research examining human trafficking from Slovakia to the United Kingdom, to explore the place of children in human trafficking processes. Rather than foregrounding cases of children as direct subjects of abuse, the paper focuses on instances where children are used to control, manipulate and exploit relatives embroiled in human trafficking. We study examples when children are moved across national borders and those when they remain in the home country, and show how in both accounts their (absent) presence constitutes a significant means for facilitating, maintaining and intensifying the exploitation of their adult relatives. Through doing so, the paper demonstrates how identifying the distinct spaces and moments within which children appear in narratives of exploitation has the potential to uncover nefarious practices occurring within the human trafficking process, as well as the indirect effects of human trafficking on family dynamics. The paper extends conceptual understandings of agency in human trafficking by illustrating how children are simultaneously subjects of exploitation and emplaced through complex channels within the exploitation of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between the football industry and the trafficking of West African youth has captivated academic, media and political interest. This article uses football trafficking as a case study to think through the broader conception of mobile African male bodies in football migration and trafficking discourses. I contribute to and move beyond existing literature on African football migration by stepping away from structural approaches currently used to conceptualise this migratory process. This is achieved by bringing migrants' subjectivities to the fore, and in doing so I also provide a novel critique of policy responses to irregular football migration. The article draws on data obtained from migrants who left West Africa for Europe, exploring the journeys these would-be footballers took, and their trajectories and circumstances after arrival. The central argument is that existing policy responses frame irregular football migrants as being ‘better off at home’. Problematically this creates a tension as for many of these migrants their country of origin is precisely where they do not want to be. Consequently, many remain in destination countries illegally without any means of subsistence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]