Abstract
Child trafficking remains a serious public concern in China, which is related to several forms of exploitation on children as well as threatens public security and endangers the stability of the country. This paper used the latest judgment documents from the court as a new data source, and identified the key nodes and trafficking paths by using a series of network indicators to enhance the public’s understanding of the crime mechanism of child trafficking. By contrast with the results of the previous literature, some new trends of child trafficking crime in China were discovered: (i) Child trafficking is developing towards the direction of trans-provincial and trans-regional crime. (ii) There is a growing tendency for the trafficked children to migrate from the southwest to the east coastal area. (iii) Non-capital cities were playing an increasingly important role in the national trafficking network. Moreover, the obvious gender difference of child trafficking was observed: (i) Buyers from South China show a clear preference for boys, while buyers from Hebei, Henan and Zhejiang tend to buy girls rather than boys. (ii) Boys have a higher probability to be trafficked within-province rather than girls. Based on these findings, the possible causes of these phenomena were discussed; and corresponding countermeasures were proposed to help the government further combat child trafficking crime for illegal adoption more effectively. Verification of these findings and further study on this problem can be launched based on more actual trafficking cases in the future.