The Problem of Trafficking in ‘Orphans’

In a small village in Southeast Asia, a women approaches several poor families. She tells them about a wonderful opportunity: if their children go with her, they will have the chance to be housed and fed and to receive an education. The parents and guardians, imagining how food security and education could mean a way out of poverty for their children, agree to the woman’s proposal. However, the children soon find themselves living in an ‘orphanage’.

This is the promise made to parents in poverty in a number of countries around the world: ”let your children go with us and we promise them a better future”. Sometimes parents are paid to hand over their children. At other times, they themselves give money, thinking they are helping to pay for their child’s education.

The offer sounds too good to be true.  And it usually is.

The recruitment of ‘orphans’

In many countries children are recruited into orphanages – a large number of which are run as for-profit businesses – for the purpose of exploiting them by benefiting from volunteers and other generous individuals who provide donations in the belief that their money is being used to support vulnerable children without families. This process of recruitment is known as ‘paper orphaning’. In some cases, traffickers even create fraudulent documentation, including death certificates of parents and new identity registration documents, in order to convince voluntourists and foreign donors that the children living in the orphanage are ‘double orphans’, i.e. both parents have died. Some children may end up in dangerous working conditions or may also become victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

Many of these ‘orphanages’ or ‘children’s homes’ are located in popular tourist areas where voluntourism, the combining of travel and charity work, is on the rise. Orphanages become profit-making enterprises, fuelled by fees paid by foreign donors and served by a revolving door of mainly well-intentioned volunteers.  In some cases, children are trained to perform traditional dances or songs for volunteers and visiting tourists. In other cases, orphanage operators have been known to deliberately keep children malnourished for the purpose of preying on emotions to bolster the traffickers’ plea for donations.

Often volunteers return home and go on to fundraise thousands of dollars to support the children they encounter during their voluntourism experiences, having no idea how the money is used and how much represents profit for orphanage owners and traffickers. Make no mistake – there are big bucks involved in this business.

Some have called this phenomenon ‘the orphanage industrial complex’ or ‘orphanage entrepreneurship’. Legally speaking, the recruitment of children from families through fraud, deception and abuse of vulnerability and for the purpose of exploiting children for profit should be called what it is – child trafficking.

Stahili’s response

Stahili is doing something about this by engaging in a process known as de-institutionalisation. In other words, we help get children out of institutions such as orphanages and back with their families or in alternative family-based care. Stopping the source of donor money, in combination with strengthening family-based care and long-term educational solutions, acts as a disincentive for orphanage owners and the traffickers who supply them. Indeed, Stahili is partnering with local authorities in one region where we currently work in Kenya to create an ‘orphanage free community’.

The international community agrees: keeping children in families and communities is best for the child. The institutionalisation of children in orphanages or other forms of residential care should only be used in the short term and as a last resort. Institutionalisation affects the physical, mental, and psychological development of children.

Research shows that keeping children with families is better for them. In the long run, supporting family and community based systems of care is more cost-effective and better for children. Getting children back with families is however not enough and underlying causes of poverty and inequality must also be addressed.

By investing in families, children’s’ right to a family life is protected, and they have the chance to thrive in a supportive environment that provides for real what a corrupt orphanage only promises: food, housing, and an education, but without the element of exploitation.

It is up to us, as volunteers, campaigners and donors, to do our due diligence into the organisations we support. We should report suspicions of abuse or exploitation to authorities if possible and help to educate those around us in our own communities. Together we can tackle corrupt orphanages and defend the rights of children.

 

Thanks to Saskia Wishart for her support in the preparation of this post.