The Trust Conference 2018, hosted by Thomson Reuters Foundation, featured a conference theme on orphanage and trafficking. In this video, Kate van Doore, International Child Rights Lawyer of Griffith University Law School, discusses her experience with opening up an orphanage in Nepal, and another in Uganda, and then discovering that the children in these homes had living parents and families and that the orphanages had been made into money-making enterprises.
She describes learning that the orphanage director of the home her organization funded in Uganda had committed some minor-level fraud and moving to close down the orphanage. "We started trying to figure out what are we going to do with all these kids? We need another orphanage. Will another organization take them? What do we do, these are orphaned children?" she says in her presentation. "And the kids started saying to us: 'Can I just go home now?,' 'I'd really like to see my mom,' 'I have a family,' 'My name's not Joseph.'" Van Doore continues "We realized things weren't as they appeared to be. And funnily enough, we were able to trace the families quite quickly because families had been looking for their children."
"So once we found the families, we heard the same story over and over again, and that was that this particular orphanage director had been moving through villages, promising an education for the children to the parents, taking the children with her, and then when she got to the capital, Kampala, having them in her orphanage and touting them as orphans for international funding and so volunteers would come. And, as you know, many volunteers will actually pay to stay and volunteer in orphanages"
From this discovery, Van Doore and her partners decided to look into the orphanage they were running in Nepal and found the same stories of children being recruited into the orphanage with the promise of education. In fact, says Van Doore, "many of the parents in Nepal had paid the recruiters to take the children, believing that they were going to be educated, only for them to arrive in Kathmandu, be sold or entered into an orphanage and then used as this commodity to attract volunteers and to attract international funding. And here we were, meeting that demand."
Van Doore describes thinking, as a lawyer, that this must be child trafficking and made it her mission to "try to rectify what was going on." In 2016, she published a paper that articulated a definition of orphanage trafficking and notes, in this presentation, several efforts have been underway to recognize orphanage trafficking as a form of exploitation.