Today, on 16 October 2018, NGOs across the world are joining forces in a global trafficking campaign to raise awareness of the scale, the roots and the consequences of human and child trafficking. Unfortunately, child trafficking is a subject that is extremely relevant to anyone involved in institutional residential childcare. So, in this blog, I will describe some of the ways in which the two are connected.
Child trafficking is defined as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer of control over, harbouring and/or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation. Trafficking of children can happen between countries, but also within countries. When we talk about the horrors of trafficking, we mean more than just the movement of children from their family situation to a different destination, we also talk about what happens at the other end: sexual exploitation, forced labour, forced begging, and conditions of slavery.
All of these things sound horrendous, but most people do not make the connection with the notion of ‘orphanages’ and residential institutional childcare. In reality, there are many ways in which these things are connected. Some ways are more obvious than others.
Let’s start with the most obvious way: the orphanage industry. This has been brought up in previous blogs, but cannot be left out here. The orphanage industry refers to institutions that call themselves orphanages that have been opened with the purpose of receiving money from foreign (and sometimes also domestic) donors and from visiting volunteers. The children in these ‘orphanages’ almost all have at least one living parent. They were often brought to the ‘orphanage’ by child-finders or child-recruiters, who go to extremely poor families and persuade them that their child will have a better future – receiving food, education and healthcare – if he or she is placed in the ‘orphanage’. In some cases, when persuasion does not work, coercion or threats are used instead.
Once children are in the ‘orphanage’, they will not receive the amazing care that was promised. Most of the money from foreign donations will flow into the pockets of the people running the ‘orphanage’, little of it will reach the children. In fact, in some places, people have realised that when the children are in very bad shape – badly dressed, malnourished – foreign donors tend to give more money. So the children are purposefully kept in that state. This is a blatant form of child trafficking.
Another form that is hard to deny or ignore is that of illegal adoption. Situations like where parents believe they are putting their children in a boarding school to get an education, but when they come back to collect the children, they find there is no trace to be found of them. With increasingly strict laws and regulations surrounding adoption, for the protection of the children, people who find it hard to adopt through official channels look for other ways. And when there are buyers, it will never be long before sellers emerge. In countries like Nepal and Guatemala, a moratorium has been placed on all inter-country adoption when it became apparent that these kinds of practices were wide-spread. However, they still take place in other countries.
Other situations that put residential institutional childcare within the definition of child trafficking may be less visible, but no less true. While children are not always placed in institutions with the express purpose of exploiting them, in practice that may still be what happens. For example, when children who grow up in a Buddhist monastery or in a Talibeh are made to go out on the street to beg for food or money. There is no problem with adults renouncing possessions or choosing to live only on what is provided, but to send children out to beg because of this is exploitation.
When proper child safeguarding policies are not in place and enforced, which is the case in many places where volunteers are welcomed to spend time with the children in ‘orphanages’, this can put the children at extreme risk. This will be taken as an opportunity by predators looking to sexually exploit children, a common occurrence. In some countries, children are known to have disappeared from ‘orphanages’ in astonishing numbers. Child traffickers are glad to take advantage of the lack of supervision and of the vulnerability of the children to make a profit.
Sometimes a situation can start in a grey area and gradually get out of control. For example, it is important for children’s development to give them the chance to help around the house in a limited way and to do small chores, to help them prepare for the day when they need to stand on their own two feet. However, this is not the same as making the children completely responsible for all the cooking and cleaning, and often even the care of the younger children. When you get to that – and many ‘orphanages’ do – you have moved away from helping the child develop necessary skills and have reached child labour and exploitation. And in some places, unfortunately, it is pushed even further, to where the children are forced to work in the field or are explicitly offered for sexual exploitation.
As you see, there are many, many ways in which the problem of child trafficking is not just connected but intertwined with ‘orphanages’ and residential institutional childcare. If we are serious in our claim to want to put an end to child trafficking, then we have to put an end to the institutionalisation of children too. It has become abundantly clear over the past decades that children cannot be sufficiently protected against trafficking when they are in institutions.
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