When Americans and others living in the global north (aka Westerners) think about trafficking, they tend to have an image of a child being kidnapped by a bad guy, and then sexually exploited. While that is certainly a trafficking issue, there are all kinds of child trafficking. You may not have heard of orphanage trafficking before today, but it is real and real life horror story happening all around the world, every single day.
It is a genuinely horrific idea to contemplate. It is, simply put, the use of children as commodities by using them to bring profit to a business that is characterized as an orphanage through solicitation of donations, inflated adoption fees, and international charitable tourism expenses, and even direct sales of children or child parts.
What is it? How can a child be trafficked into an orphanage? Or indeed, out of one? Isn’t an orphanage supposed to be a safe place for - well - orphans?
Katie Milazzois a repeat guest on Optimistic Voices, and during Season One of our podcast during November of 2022, she discussed her work with the Child Prosperity Centre. Since that time, the organization she headed up at the time has been transformed and has new supporting organizations, and a new Director, who just happens to be Katie's husband, Johnny Donoghue. The organization Johnny now heads up is called the Child and Family Permanency Services Centre, and like the program that HCW supports in Sierra Leone, CFPS works to reintegrate children separated from family care back into families, and to strengthen vulnerable families so that they can care for themselves. CFPS enjoys a stellar reputation in community where they are located, and along with their reintegration work, and because of their focus on child protection issues, have found themselves in a position to witness some pretty terrible orphanage and orphan trafficking in their own community - and have taken steps to address these issues.
Katie has stayed in the field of child protection and child welfare, and remained in Sierra Leone. Shd is now a Protection Specialist of Anti-trafficking and Gender Based Violence at World Hope International.
World Hope International
Child and Family Permanency Centre
Video Presentation by David T. Musa, CRC TCM Senior Consultant on how Family based care models for orphan response can help to disrupt the practice of Orphanage Trafficking
Helpingchildrenworldwide.org