Abstract
Over the past decades, numerous reports have emerged suggesting that children from poor countries are being obtained illegally and transported transnationally in order to meet the high Western demand for adoptable healthy babies. This chapter identifies the structural components of the transnational illegal adoption market by applying the basic logic of the routine activity theory that has been developed by Cohen and Felson. It explains that in the context of extreme inequality (“criminogenic asymmetries”) between the sending and the receiving countries, supply, demand, as well as weak public and private sector social control mechanisms have contributed to the nature and size of the illegal adoption market. The chapter outlines the main difference between conventional forms of human trafficking and child trafficking for adoption purposes and explains why the latter phenomenon is particularly difficult to detect.