Childhood has, in Western culture and in recent history, been defined in very deterministic terms as a period fundamentally different from adulthood. Notably, labor and sexuality were perceived to be adult activities and had no place in the lives of children. Constructivists have argued that such a perception is a Western social construction rather than nature-given. Circumstantial conditions, such as the demand for highly skilled labor that requires a time consuming education process, have created an artificial divide between citizens who qualify for adult work life, and those still in training.
If childhood is indeed socially constructed, global generalizations about children should be avoided. While this observation is important and deserving of reflection, I will argue a more pragmatic position in this chapter. I claim that there are some central distinctions between children and adults that affect the way we should look at child victims of trafficking compared to adult victims of trafficking. These differences are (i) developmental, (ii) cognitive, and (iii) social.